Fractured: International Hostage Thriller

by Clàr NÕ Chonghaile

  “I don’t think so. No. What purpose will it serve?”

  I could hear my mother inhale deeply. “And maybe I am a little afraid of going, Peter. I have found a new life here. I am working in a hospital. I don’t want to go back to where I was. I know I am weak. If I leave now, maybe I will not have the strength to come back.”

  “I will go,” I said. “When is the funeral?”

  It was a sudden decision, an elemental one. It was always this way, and would always be. My own words surprised me and for a moment, I felt calm. I would go to Cork, and I would say goodbye at a graveside, and then, and then… But first, I would go to another grave. If I could, and if she would take me. If I could bring myself to knock on Selena Ridge’s door and present myself as the illegitimate son of her long-dead brother. I felt overwhelmed by this latest role.

  My mother told me I had about a week to get back to Cork. Tim would be buried in the same seaside graveyard as his parents. I liked the thought of him in that wind-swept place of salt, bobbing dandelions and moss-encrusted stones. I did not have much time. This journey across thousands of miles of land, heart and soul must end now.

  Don had helped me find Selena. I could have asked my mother for the little she knew, but I wanted this to be my journey. Even after Mogadishu, I did not feel we could talk about this easily. I did not want to hurt her, and I had finally begun to accept her personal tragedy in all this. She is happy now. I did not want to reawaken her demons.

  I worked from the Post’s office in Washington, where I stayed with Don, until I hit a solid lead. A local paper with an article on a young man who had been killed in 1980 in a freak shooting. It happened in a place called Monrovia, in a country called Liberia, where the US sent its freed slaves so that it would not have to face its shame. Outside a Freemasons’ lodge, of all places.

  The local reaction of shock and confusion had been captured well in the Denver Post. There was a picture of the family. Without Shaun. As though they had prepared for the day when this would happen. A tall, straight father, a smaller mother with a big smile and her son’s eyes, a lanky, self-consciously casual twenty-year-old woman, who seemed to be grimacing at the camera. Perhaps her brother took the picture. It was a study in tension, as all family photos are.

  The mother’s right hand is reaching for her daughter, who seems to be tilting away. Of course, it means nothing. It was just a moment in time. But it was preserved for ever in the digital archive of the newspaper, out of context, reframed for tragedy. I found one other mention of my father in an article on journalists’ deaths, this time in a national newspaper. There was a small snapshot of a man wearing sunglasses and a loose green scarf. He was half turning from the camera and stepping from a muddy verge onto a road. The caption said Sierra Leone. 1978.

  I sat on the street outside his sister’s house, feeling like a criminal in this place of tidy lawns, clean cars, towering plane trees and leaves that crackled beneath the feet of rosy-cheeked, shuffling middle-aged joggers. This place did not resonate for me and suddenly I felt scared, and embarrassed, and I turned the key in the engine to drive away. But I knew there was nowhere to go that did not start here. I switched off the engine, got out, walked up the garden path, and knocked the lion’s head against the door. I tried to remember if I had looked in the mirror before leaving. Could I remember myself shaving? I ran a hand over my chin. I had not. I should have made an effort.

  The door opened. She was still slim, but the sharp lines of the young woman in the photograph had softened. Her long face was creased. She had laughed too much, and cried too much.

  “Come in, Peter.”

  I followed her into the house, down a dark corridor and into a back sitting room that dazzled. The bright midday rays of a wintry sun flooded the room through French doors, but the heat was from the blazing fire. The walls were decorated with black-and-white photographs of boy soldiers, rice paddies, mist-covered mountains, market places with mango stalls. My head spun.

  “I find as I get older that I need more heat. I hope it is not too hot for a young man. Please sit down.”

  The room was prettily worn-down. You could tell children’s toys, and pencils, and teddies, had once covered the low coffee table, and filled the corners on either side of the fire. Two Barbie doll stickers on the French doors hinted at a busy life long gone. I sat on a cream sofa. It looked newer than the other pieces of furniture. An empty-nest purchase.

  “You said on the phone that your mother, Nina Walters, worked with Shaun? In Liberia?” Selena said, taking a seat opposite me in a dark easy chair with a frayed cover.

  She smoothed her skirt nervously, and patted her short white hair. There was tea on the table between us. She gestured, I nodded. I thought she must have done this before, a lot, but probably not for some time.

  I croaked a ‘yes’, then coughed. I had not expected my voice to fail me but it had been some weeks since I had spoken to anyone other than waiters and taxi drivers.

  “Yes, she was a journalist, and she met Shaun in Liberia, just before he was shot.”

  Selena shook her head. “It still shocks me to hear people say that.”

  I made to apologise, but she waved me away.

  “No, no, I don’t mean it like that. He was shot. It just still seems so far-fetched that I cannot believe it happened to Shaun.”

  “I understand it was something of a freak accident,” I said, wishing I could sound more caring. I was finding it hard to concentrate on Selena’s words. I didn’t know how to ask what I wanted to ask. How I could say what I needed to say?

  “I have to confess. I remember your mother. She called a few months after it happened to talk to my parents, but they couldn’t take any more calls. There had been so many, and they were tired, grieving. They had had their fill of tributes, which I suppose in some ways helped to dull the pain in those first few weeks. Or maybe it is because the tributes made Shaun seem less real to us, more like the kind of person who could get shot in a dangerous place. Of course, we always understood he took risks. But he played them down whenever he came home. By the time your mother called, my parents had gone silent, they had retreated into their own twosome. I think maybe they could only have the silence they wanted together. You see only they really understood what each one was going through. He was nobody else’s son.”

  Selena stopped to hand me a mug of tea. It had I heart NYC printed on the side.

  “That was Shaun’s mug,” she said.

  My hand trembled, some tea sloshed onto my jeans. I set the cup down. I was still digesting her words, still finding my own. I looked up and Selena was smiling at me.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I know why you are here. I guessed as soon as you called, and said you were Nina Walters’ son. I have always wondered whether you existed. I thought you might. I am so glad you have finally found us, or at least me. My parents are dead now, of course.”

  “I don’t understand,” was all I managed to whisper.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  PETER

  Selena settled back into her seat.

  “You will have to forgive an old lady for hoarding her secrets,” she said. “Shaun was my hero, but of course, also my brother. Feted yet fallible, funny and annoying, my hero and my nemesis. Do you have any siblings?”

  I shook my head. I too had eased back onto the sofa. There was something hypnotic about her soft voice, with its slow drawl. Maybe there was something here. I felt comfortable. I felt like someone was taking over, and it hit me that I had been longing for this for weeks. I could listen. This voice was not just in my head.

  “You said you had seen my picture in the paper when they reported his death. The one of me and my parents? I remember. Shaun took that. I was home from college for Thanksgiving, I was studying to be a teacher. It was 1979, I think. Shaun was home for once. He had been gone for a while, got married, that failed, and now he was back. I think he had just been to Northern Ireland; Derry, I think it was. He was full of it. Confi
dence, enthusiasm, passion and a kind of madness. He didn’t talk about the risks he took, but he did talk about the danger to others. When he got going, he was hard to stop. He talked like his words could change things.” She laughed a little.

  “But he was preaching to the converted. We all idolised him. Our whole world view was Shaun. What he said was right, where he had been was interesting, what he thought should happen should. We Americans can be quite introverted, but when one of ours is involved, we can care. I see that now with Iraq, and Afghanistan, although there is a fatigue creeping in too.”

  She stopped, hesitated, and then, as if deciding something, pushed on.

  “I shouldn’t bother you with this, but my eldest daughter, Maria, is a widow. Her husband, Dean, was killed in Afghanistan last year. I know it’s terrible, but I think, thank God there were no children. Maria has taken it very badly. She was in college, but has dropped out. She lives with her sister, Belinda, now. They are in New York. I don’t always know what they are doing. Belinda’s at art school, I think. They’re still so young. Maria says now that she wants to be a journalist, to go to Afghanistan, to tell the truth about what’s happening there. She has done some reporting here, but honestly, what does she know about going overseas? I hope she has put it out of her head. Of course, I’m worried, and biased, and probably just an old woman ranting at the moon, but I don’t want her to go. I’ve already lost one person to war, a war that was not for me or mine. A war he wasn’t even fighting. And then Dean. Such a waste. I don’t want to lose another, and not Maria. She is too fragile now. But of course, I can’t speak to her. She doesn’t want to hear me. I thought you might be able to reach her, because of your profession, and your… experience.”

  “I could contact her. At least make sure she knows the risks,” I said.

  I don’t know if I meant it, maybe it was just something useful to say after this outpouring of common-day tragedy that seemed too large for the pretty room where I was sitting, the little house I had invaded to make myself feel better, to cure myself, never thinking that there were people here who needed help more than me. Selena seemed to sense my discomfort.

  “But how rude of me, these are not your worries,” she said.

  She leant forward to throw some more heavy logs on the sputtering fire. When she sat back up, her eyes had lost the sheen that had threatened to spill onto her thin cheeks when she was talking about Maria.

  “Thank you,” she said, as if just hearing my offer now. “I’m sure that would be helpful.”

  She sounded tired and sad, as though she did not believe I could help but she knew, for sure, that nothing she could do herself would work.

  “Where was I? Oh yes, I was talking about the photograph. Shaun was clowning around. He said I was too tall, like a giraffe with the interesting bit out of frame. He knew I was sensitive about my height. He always knew which buttons to push. When the call came telling us he was dead, I picked up the phone. I can’t remember who was there, an editor I think. But I do recall I thought it might be one of his friends, that he had organised a prank. But even as I tried to believe this, I couldn’t really buy into it, not even for those few seconds. He could rib me but he was never cruel. The next few days were hell. My parents collapsed. Then we had the slow monotony of the return of the body, the wake, the burial. If anything, that whole process pushed Shaun further from us, as though death really was another country. We could not find Shaun in any of this. Then weeks later, your mother called. Again, I took the call. I was staying here in Colorado at the time, I had postponed my final year to help my parents. My father had stopped working, and my mother rarely got up. Of course, they eventually picked themselves up and carried on, and even had some happy moments before they died. But it was a harsh sort of life, that happiness was hard-won, and always paid for later in long silences, my mother peering into her tea as she pretended to watch television, my father topping up his brandy and staring into the fire, until he fell asleep where he was. When he did that, I wasn’t able to move him, so I would leave him, with a light on and a blanket Shaun brought him from Kenya over his legs. He was always gone by morning. I hate to think of those awakenings. That return to reality, that slow climb up the stairs, that realisation that sleep had come and gone and the world was still without their boy. Who knows what he dreamed. He never said. He wasn’t that kind of man.”

  “Did my mother tell you about her and Shaun?” I asked. I was gripping the mug between my hands now. I noticed, and afraid I would somehow crush it, I went to set it down on the table. Selena seemed to follow.

  “It is yours now. You can do what you like with it,” she said. “No, your mother said nothing. But I could tell she had been close to Shaun. First of all, she called so much later. She had been grieving. And she was still grieving. And what she left unsaid was interesting. She didn’t tell me about the kind of man he was, or how good his work had been, or say what a shame it was to lose such a talent. She just said, ‘I didn’t know your brother for very long, but I will miss him and I wanted to tell you how sorry I am.’ She said a little more, but the line was bad and I could tell she was upset. I knew she had been with him when he was actually shot, that was in the papers. I found out the rest from Shaun.”

  She paused. I was lost in thought, imagining my mother at that time, how pained she must have felt. She would have been pregnant, just. She would have been back with my father in Abidjan. Did she leave the house to call? Did he know about the call? He was such a smart man. I was the fool for not asking him when he was still alive.

  Slowly I registered Selena’s silence, and then I registered her words.

  “Shaun told you? I don’t understand.”

  Selena rose from her chair and crossed to one of the black-and-white photographs hanging on the wall. It showed a skinny child, staring brazenly at the camera, defiance and dignity, and a gun in his thin hand.

  She brought the picture back to her chair, sat down and turned it over. From behind the cardboard backing of the frame, she pulled out several folded pieces of white paper.

  “I don’t know why I keep it inside here. It’s stupid really. But I told you, old ladies like secrets, and maybe I hoped that one day someone would find this, and it would be exciting and life-affirming and magical, partly because of its hiding place. My daughters and my husband don’t know about this. I didn’t see any point in telling them. I didn’t know you would ever come, and I knew Shaun would never want me to seek you out. You see, he loved your mother. He would have loved you, but he would have understood what had to happen. Read this. It’s addressed to me but I think it’s really more for you.”

  She put the letter into my shaking hands, stood up and left the room, shutting the door softly on me and my father’s words.

  Dear Selena,

  It’s 4.30am here in Monrovia, and the rain is hammering on the roof. I’m not sure if that’s what woke me, or maybe it was the gunshots across the river. I’d been lying awake for a while, and I suddenly realised I needed to talk to someone. I don’t want to wake the woman beside me (more about that later, and, Sel, it’s not what you think!). In any case, the conversation I have to have with her is different.

  I need you, Sel. Your pragmatism, your sharp tongue, your common sense. I’ve been lying here, thinking about what the gunshots might mean, and about what I saw today, and wondering what you, all the way over there, would make of it all. Sometimes, I think I might actually be in a different world here, perhaps the plane I came on just kept going straight up after take-off, into another dimension. This room with its bare wood floors, the sensuous, sinister smell of the rain thundering down outside, the rat-tat of unseen lives being lost down on the streets, the fear in the air – it’s galaxies away from Mom’s call to table, the chicken pie, the radio news, the summer camps. It’s ridiculously remote even from my more frenetic life in London, a life I hope you’ll come and see one day, when you finish college. Do come, Sel! I miss you.

  Today, I saw thirt
een men shot to death on a beach. They were tied to posts – I think they were tree trunks meant to hold electricity wires – and then slowly, horribly, inefficiently they were shot. They were members of the old government, but above and beyond that, they were just middle-aged men, terrified fathers, brothers and husbands. They had to square up to death as crowds yelled at them. Worse, they faced death with my camera in their faces. I’ve sent the pictures out on a flight to London. You might see them soon. I tried to capture whatever dignity they had left. I framed my shots so that I didn’t show the urine pouring down one man’s trembling legs. I shot from behind, and to the side when one man’s face dissolved into tears and snot as the firing squad raised their guns to him. I took rolls of film and I sent them all back. Who knows if anyone will publish them? It’s hard to get a sense of what the outside world thinks. It’s hard, really, to believe there is an outside world here. What if we are all trapped in a nightmare, a horrible collage of all our worst fears, our deepest knowledge of evil?

  I’ve been feeling lost since I got here. It’s been two weeks now. Another week to go, I think, and then back on a plane, first to Abidjan and then onto London, and my new apartment where the furniture is still finding its feet, settling into the floor. Thankfully, the whole business with Janine is now over. The lawyers have done their worst, and the papers have been signed. I can see you nodding your head, biting your lip to stop yourself from saying, ‘I told you so.’ I know you never liked her, and perhaps I should have paid more attention to your raised eyebrows, the snide looks you exchanged with Mom, your pointed questions. But I thought I knew what I was doing. Of course, everything you thought but didn’t say was true. Ironically, I think Dad, despite his taciturn nature, or what you call his ‘one sentence a month budget’, came closest to influencing me, but too little too late.

  Did I ever tell you what he said on our wedding day? I don’t think so, and I think I know why now. I was afraid he was right and too scared to repeat what he said in case it would somehow make it come true. I guess I always knew he had hit the nail on the head. When I was pacing behind the marquee in the garden, and Mom was fussing about the roses on the ends of the seats, and you were getting ready, he came up to me, touched my arm and said, “Let’s go sit.” He led me to the bench among the pine trees, where you and I used to smoke when we were teenagers, and sat me down. He didn’t say anything for a while, and we just listened to the magpies. Then he said, as if picking up on a conversation we’d been having before, “But are you sure Janine loves you, for you, inside?”