Fractured: International Hostage Thriller

by Clàr NÕ Chonghaile

  She came to me then, knelt by my feet and put her head on my knees. Her arms came around my neck and we hugged for the last time, holding everything we had had and would not have in that small space between our bodies. One last time.

  “Did you ever love me, Peter?”

  I barely heard the words, but of course, I had been hearing them for months. The question resonated in my brain long before I went to Somalia, it came to me as I lay on that mat in that first cell and later as I stared at the moon through my barred window. Did I ever love her? How could I not? But perhaps I was asking the wrong question all the time. Could I ever love? Did I have that capacity? Could I have that capacity?

  I took a deep breath. I looked into Michelle’s face. This was the moment when I must stop and think, really think, and then move forward with whatever knowledge I had gleaned. Love was not a state of mind. Love was action, life, everything together, spun into the soul, running through the veins so that it was the gold filament of life. Love was desire and sacrifice and the other. I had not yet learnt to love. I was still an unfinished man.

  “I thought I did,” I said. “I did to the best of my ability. And I still do. But I know it is not enough. It was never enough for you. You deserved more. I’m so sorry. I don’t think I loved Esther more than you. Or less. I don’t love my son, because I don’t know him. All these things are wrong. I cannot live feeling like this. I need to find a way to love, and then, I need to start with Godwin because he is my son. I have hurt you too much, I know. I hope one day you will forgive me. I really hope so. I don’t know what else to say Michelle. I fucked up.”

  “You really did,” she said. “I would have loved you for ever, Peter. We were good together, maybe not perfect but I wouldn’t have known. I could have gone on for years with you, we could have had a family. Maybe it would have been fine. And what does love mean anyway? If we were happy, we would have thought we were in love. And we would have been happy. Probably most of the time.”

  She was right. And wrong. Because we would not have been happy in the end. I would have fucked up again. I had not been ready to love. I was perhaps not ready now, but I owed it to my son to try. It was late but there was light in the sky yet. I could sleep or I could set out on a new road.

  We sat for a little while longer as the afternoon died and the room filled with a limpid late autumn light that speckled the floor and the walls and then slipped away as darkness crept in.

  “Will you leave Paris?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “For a while, at least.”

  Michelle rose, her dark hair catching the last rays of light as the sun skipped behind the buildings across the street. It was not just the day dying. The apartment had fallen asleep. As we had talked, the essence of these rooms had slowly slipped away and now we were alone with just walls, a roof and some denuded furniture.

  I walked to the door, stopped and turned. I wanted to say something that would somehow be great, that would do justice to Michelle, that would sum up something that had been very good, something that did not deserve to die this way.

  “I will miss you so much,” I said.

  She paused, and then with a smile, she whispered, “Good luck.”

  And she closed the door.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  NINA

  Today is November 14th. I am in the AMISOM clinic with Dr Mugyenyi. I will go and visit Aisha and Lila later. Nabakoba told me a patrol would go to Medina after lunch. They will drop me a street away, so as not to draw attention to the house, or the women inside. Anyone watching will only see a small veiled figure scuttle along the path and through the blue iron gate. My trainers will be hidden under my long brown abaya. My disguise is crude but adequate. We are told that Al-Shabaab has mostly withdrawn, and AMISOM has claimed victory, but beyond the amorphous idea of Al-Shabaab, there are people, fighters who have always lived in Mogadishu, and who still do, men who have buried their guns, for now, in backyards and sandy courtyards. But they are still there. And then there are the bombs.

  A few weeks ago, a truck packed with drums of fuel exploded near the K4 roundabout, outside the education ministry where scores of students had gathered to learn if they had won scholarships to study in Turkey. That was a busy day at Ubah’s hospital.

  Around seventy people were killed, but many more came to us, some even walked. Faces without eyebrows, heads without hair, hands without skin, bodies deformed so that the humanity was hard to see. That is, of course, what they want. We worked all day, and into the night. When I stepped outside to clear my head several hours after the explosion, parents were still wailing at the gate, begging us to let them in. We couldn’t. The corridors were already crowded with bodies, writhing, screaming and bleeding bodies. When Dr Mugyenyi and I returned to the base, passing the roundabout where the bomb had twisted trees into grotesque shapes and sent red-hot shrapnel into soft flesh, we sat under the stars, gazing at the sea for an hour. We did not speak.

  Today began as all the others do, with a slow realisation that my eyes were open and staring into the dark. I had no idea that everything was about to change again. We never do. We start each day with the assumption of continuity when really we shouldn’t. I know this, but while I may be old, I am not yet wise enough, or brave enough to accept the randomness of change. So the charade goes on.

  The patient was silent when he hobbled in. He may have been in shock, although he was not shaking. He was leaning on a smaller boy, a child really, who had his right arm around his companion’s waist. The first thing I noticed, I admit now with shame, was the older boy’s T-shirt. It was black with a big yellow Batman logo across the chest. And then I saw that he was missing a foot. And a hand. His right foot and left hand. Bloody rags covered the stumps, but the one around his hand had unravelled and trailed to his knee, like a tattered flag of surrender. Dr Mugyenyi rushed towards him, catching him as, slowly almost gracefully, he fell forward.

  “Cross amputation,” Dr Mugyenyi said in a low voice as he laid the teenager onto a stretcher.

  He began to unravel the bandages, while the younger boy retreated to a corner and sat on the floor, his eyes wide, his stare blank. Halima, a gentle nurse from the southern town of Afmadow, appeared at my side. She breathed a few prayers under her breath and, as she helped Dr Mugyenyi remove the bandages, she questioned the younger boy. His answers were slow and stilted. Halima translated them so that the revealed story seemed to bear no relation to the series of tired almost-moans that came from the figure huddled on the floor. The older boy had passed out by now. It must have been excruciating, even though Halima and Dr Mugyenyi removed the bandages as gently as they could.

  “His name is Minhaj, he is seventeen. They said he was a thief, but his brother says that is not true. Minhaj was picked up from the market in Afgoye a week ago. He was sentenced to have his hand and foot cut off. His brother says it was unfortunate they chose the left hand because that is the one he writes with. Wrote with. The brother says that they cut him first in a football stadium in Afgoye. Then they took him back to the house where he was being held. A few days later a sheikh came and said they had not cut the right place on his foot. So they cut off another two inches.”

  Halima fell silent. The bandages were off now and the boy’s wounds were exposed. I was shaking. I took a step back from the table where Dr Mugyenyi was hooking an IV to the boy’s slender arm. I tore my eyes away from the mashed flesh, from the exposed white bones.

  Minhaj’s face was peaceful now. He could have been sleeping. I looked at Dr Mugyenyi. He was cleaning the wounds, slowly and cautiously, but he was muttering under his breath, and the sunlight sheen on his glasses meant I couldn’t see his eyes. I went to the boy on the floor and sat by him. I held his hand, helplessly repeating, “It’s okay. He’ll be all right now. He’ll be all right.”

  I knew it was a lie. What would this disabled boy do after we had treated him? What was out there for him?

  Another nurse came into the tent. Her
eyes found me on the floor and she beckoned me out.

  “You have a phone call. In the commander’s office.”

  It took me a moment to understand what she was saying. I had a mobile phone, but only Peter had the number. If someone was looking for me through the base commander, it must be about Peter. I jumped up, dropping the quiet boy’s hand. He didn’t seem to notice. His eyes were closed now and his breathing seemed heavier. Maybe he was sleeping. How would he survive after this? These thoughts chased me as I rushed to the door. Dr Mugyenyi looked up and I shook my head to his silent question. Peter’s name rang through my brain as we crossed the yard towards the commander’s prefabricated office – a container with a noisy air conditioner hanging outside the window, dripping onto soft sandbags below. Peter, Peter, Peter. That word, which had for so long meant more than any other word, became the rhythm of my steps, my heartbeat, my breathing.

  The commander, recently arrived from Kampala, was standing beside his desk, holding the phone. His face was sombre. He avoided my eyes. There are no new ways of transmitting bad news. No new ways of mourning, of loving, of losing. We must copy those who went before, we must bow to conventions.

  When I put down the phone, my heart was still beating to a name, but it was not Peter’s. And as I stood there, looking out the window at the tiny dust devils skipping around the bleached yard, I realised I had forgotten this rhythm, this name, but that once my heart had thrilled to these three letters. Tim.

  I didn’t need to cry. I didn’t want to cry. It seemed almost trivial to mark this with tears. I wanted to sit and think, and so I wandered past the silent commander into the sun. He lifted a hand, maybe to pat my arm, but I was gone. Outside, I went straight for the skinny shade under the thorn bushes. I needed to be alone.

  It was Tim’s sister, Bernadette, who had called. She couldn’t locate Peter. I told her I would try.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “A massive heart attack, Nina. They said no one could have survived it. You know, he’s been ill for months. He had no energy, the poor man. I think his system just shut down,” she said, her rolling accent opening a portal to Tim’s small kitchen, overlooking the sea.

  The phone became a seashell of memory as I drank in the sounds behind her – was that murmuring the wind that blew open the windows, startling us both, last time I visited my ex-husband? Surely that faint whistling was the old black-caked kettle that Tim insisted on using because it had been his mother’s? When I put down the phone and looked around, I was surprised to see the grim-faced commander, to be in Somalia.

  For the next hour, in the shade of spindly branches, I travelled – to Paris, to Abidjan, to Liberia, to Tim. Then I lifted myself, feeling my mortality in every aching bone, and wished like a child that I could share this part of my life with the man who shared my youth. I went to lie down. I needed oblivion.

  Dr Mugyenyi came to my dark room later. I woke to him stroking the hair from my face, and that’s when I finally cried. Because that is what Tim used to do a lifetime ago when I was trying to sleep. I would turn to face his body, he would open his arms, I would make myself small as I slipped into his embrace, nuzzling my head against his collarbone, my legs snaking around his, our bodies locked like pieces in a perfect puzzle. That is how our attempts to make a Peter invariably started. But we never could, and maybe that too is part of the web of whys that meant I found out about Tim’s death in a troubled city on the edge of Africa.

  Dr Mugyenyi played magician that night. His soft surgeon’s hands brought Tim’s hands back to life, but also dug deeper and brought back memories of my mother’s hands. Soft and plump and sweaty from the kitchen, pushing back my hair which was always falling into my eyes as she dropped to her knees to hear my latest story, and comfort me after whatever injustice had poisoned my little life. And later, much later, hands that were papery and impossibly cold, lying inert on the off-white hospital sheet. I held her hand as she passed away in a disrespectfully bright room. I didn’t notice the moment. My mother passed away as gracefully and unobtrusively as she had lived. She never wanted to rock the boat, even when she was getting off.

  Dr Mugyenyi stayed with me for hours. And at some point, he climbed under the sheet and joined me on the camp bed, holding me in his arms. When I mourned Shaun, I mourned in secret, and in shame. I mourned Tim in the arms of another man. As I lay there, after the doctor had fallen asleep, his head just centimetres from my own, our bodies squashed together, I knew I would not go to Tim’s funeral. There was even less reason for me to leave this place now. My past had moved from this world to the next, I was nobody’s business but my own.

  I needed Dr Mugyenyi, in whatever way I could have him. I needed his magic hands and this dangerous, vibrant city where I could finally forget myself. When dawn broke, I crept outside. The base was still mostly quiet, but then I heard a boom in the distance, like a gong signalling the start of the day’s chaos. I heard the engine of one of the ungainly Casspirs roar. A shout or two. And the squeal of a kite, black on grey in the dying night above me.

  I am here now. It is cool. One day soon I will go to Lido beach in the city. They say it is safer now. I will go with Dr Mugyenyi and we will take off our shoes and we will paddle in the foam, and I will hold his magic hands. But today, I must visit that other country, the past. I must tell Peter about his father. About the man who loved him as a son. The end of our story must be written for our boy so that he can start to write his own story, without restraints. Tim is no longer of this world. The world has given up on me, and I have given up on the world, and I have found my place. I can be happy here.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  PETER

  I wake suddenly, forced back into the world by the contractions of my dreams. I am sweating and my head and throat hurt, as though I have been screaming or crying. Maybe I have. There is no one here to tell me. I rub my face but if there were tears, as there have been before, they have melted into the beads of sweat. I throw off the covers and lie still, relishing the crisp slap of cold air on my sweat-soaked legs. I will never feel too cold again, even here in the shadow of snow-covered mountains, in a room where the long, shivering night has sucked the heat from the fire, leaving nothing but ashes. I will never again curse the cold.

  The nightmares have become part of my life, so much so that I am sometimes not sure what really happened all those months ago on the road to Mogadishu, and in the long weeks before. I wake sodden, not because I am reliving the shootout, but because in my dreams, Abdi turns on me and pulls the trigger, and he is smiling. Or my mother turns to me with a knife in her hand, raises it and plunges it towards my chest.

  Maybe this is the only way my brain can cope with what happened. Instead of trying to forget what it knows, it attempts to blank it out by making the horror worse, by gilding it in absurdity. Somalia is a land of immeasurable horror in my brain, a place where anything can happen, because it did. The unthinkable became real. You can’t fear the worst when the worst has happened. And yet I do. I fear, but I fear myself, not the world. I fear my ability to live on.

  That is why I am here in Colorado. I am not ready for normality. I am done with telling other stories. I am done with mining other people’s lives to give meaning to my own. I don’t want that kind of vicarious existence anymore. I am happy to have survived. I don’t want or expect anything from the future. I have withdrawn but my cave is not in a desert, but in another time. I am a time traveller. It’s as though I have come to a chasm in my road. I cannot go forward, so I must go back, and find something that will carry me across the abyss.

  This is a place of pinched faces, small eyes above scarves, muffled greetings, a place where words are to the point, functional. Who wants their face to freeze while they declaim an idea that can be presented just as well in a word or two? Outside my window, I hear the muted sounds of a frozen city coming to life. The gritting trucks snarl because the frosts have come early this year. If I got up and pulled back the curtain, I
would see the sun gleaming on the Rocky Mountains. It is a peacefully static sight. It lifts the viewer’s eyes to the horizon, and maybe that is why this type of vista makes us feel so tranquil. It suggests endless possibility. Snow-capped chimeras.

  As I return slowly to the day, I remember that my father is dead. Or rather, let me phrase that correctly: Tim is dead. My mother tracked me down yesterday, an electric bolt of low voltage distress that crackled out from Mogadishu, through the spark-plug that is and ever has been Don Struddle, into this nondescript room making the cheap Nokia on my coffee-stained bedside table vibrate. Only Don knew where I was.

  “Tim died, Peter. He died two days ago. It was a heart attack.”

  My mother was never one to surrender to emotion, but the emptiness of her words were sufficient. Tim had been a million miles from my thoughts as I continued the internal debate that had kept me cooped in this carpeted hotel room for two days. Gripping the phone, I felt a hot rush of guilt, sadness and something deeper, a regret so sharp it hit the back of my throat and crumpled my legs.

  “How?” I asked before realising she had already told me. Mum said nothing. Or maybe she had not heard me. The line was poor, an unworthy medium for such a call.

  “I mean, when?” I asked helplessly. She had already told me this too. But if I had the what, where, when and who, what else was there to say? I sat silent for a long minute. I had no father now. I was no longer any man’s son. I must be my own man.

  These ideas ripped through my brain, jumbled, half formed, rebellious, unwanted. I didn’t even try to sort them. Time enough for that later. I let them rush through, waited for the noise to subside, for the mob to surge past, and then when all was still and white and blank, I asked my mother, “Will you go?”