Fractured: International Hostage Thriller

by Clàr NÕ Chonghaile

  He was staring at me with what you used to call his X-ray glare, the one that made you think he could see right into your brain. I think I said, yes, or sure, or something stupidly banal. That was it. He grunted. We sat for a while longer, and then he said, “Time to go, son,” and off we went. At the time, I didn’t dwell on it. To be honest, as soon as I saw Janine and that dress, I didn’t think of much beyond getting her into bed! I know you and Mom disapproved but man, you have to admit she looked hot! And it wasn’t as if it was a church, just our garden. You’ve sunbathed topless there, so what’s the difference? Okay, okay, I’m just trying to annoy you. Admit it, you’re smiling now.

  Anyway, as things went sour with Janine, and I have to say the speed at which they did surprised me, I remembered Dad’s words more and more. I think now that Janine did think she loved me, but the idea she had of me bore as much resemblance to me as those studio photos you can get done in India. You know the ones – all paradise backgrounds, gaudy bright colours. She had me, we looked pretty together, I had an exciting job that reflected well on her. With her PR business and my in-the-field macho job, we were in demand as a couple. I think she even wanted us to work together – to become the core of some kind of advertising behemoth. Which in and of itself shows you the problem. Can you imagine me doing advertising shoots? Right.

  Anyway, sorry, I’m rambling. It’s just I have a particular reason to bring this all up, and we haven’t seen each other much since the divorce. I know I was home last year but I didn’t really get a chance to talk to you without Mom and Dad. And then you were studying, and grumpy! Yes, you were. I know I annoy you. I see your point. You put in the time with the folks and I waltz in, stealing your thunder, telling outlandish tales, laughing off my failed marriage, easing their pain with tales of distant places. I’m not proud of this but I don’t know what else to do. How can I manage the relationship better? Maybe one day you’ll tell me, oh-so-nearly-teacher.

  I promised to tell you about the woman beside me. No need to curl your lip like that. She’s not a whore, and how many times do I have to tell you not to believe everything you read about photojournalists? We are not all out to take drugs, have sex and exploit poor people. Well, maybe we can’t help but do the latter, but the rest is a choice.

  The woman in this bed is a journalist. But she is married. We only met a week ago and… Damn, now I’ve decided to tell you everything, I don’t know what to say. She was at the beach today. It’s not an excuse, but an explanation. But it’s not even that. I know you’ll say people who have been through traumatic situations gravitate towards each other, you’ll try some of that amateur psychology they force you to swallow before you take control of the minds of the future, but I don’t think it’s just that. I would say there is a connection between us. I would, except that I can hear your guffaws from here, even here in this fourth or fifth dimension. Okay then, we clicked. And she’s cute, very cute. And fragile, and all the things you’ve told me I like in women. To my detriment. And of course, she’s unavailable, or at least she is technically unavailable because she is, nonetheless, behind me in the bed, her hair covering the pillow, her arms crossed across her chest, her knees drawn up.

  Sel, I don’t know how to explain this but I want to see her like that every morning. It’s ridiculous, but I’ve never been as certain of anything in my life. I think this could be it. But I have no idea what she thinks. That’s the conversation we must have. Later today, or tomorrow, or if I have to, I will follow her back to her home in Abidjan and have it there. I won’t be able to let her go. I know that. Not without asking her if we have a chance, and surely, we must have. I can’t just be a fling, can I? Okay, okay, that was fishing. Did you smile generously? You know what I mean. God, I wish you were here.

  Dawn is breaking. It’s been over a week since Doe killed Tolbert. I can’t describe this place to you. I will show you the photos when we meet again. The town is like something from the south, at least in places. There are clapboard houses, shacks, a broad river crossed by two bridges, banana plants on the roadside, and fear in the air. I think that is the most terrifying thing. The fear. It clings to you. It’s worse than the smell of death, although of course there is that too. Bodies by the roadside, dumped for the dogs. I don’t photograph those too closely. There is no dignity there, no story to tell because you cannot know who that person is, why they ended up there, and the brutality I can show in other ways. With pictures from the beach, for example. Those men had names, and they still had faces. They had an identity in death. Faceless, nameless death is an affront to the individual that was. I can leave that to people’s imaginations. I did photograph one body yesterday, but just the feet. They were on the roadside, the rest of the body had slumped into the ditch. But when I crouched down, I could frame the feet and the soft, pink dog roses growing around them. There was dignity in that. A final resting place, a grave of sorts, a moment of respite from the horror. Does that make sense, Sel? Of course, you can’t know. I will send you that photograph when I get back to London. You will tell me what you think.

  Now, the birds are making an almighty noise. She will wake up soon, and I want to get her coffee. That should tell you how powerfully I feel about her. There is no room service in this hotel. I will have to go down to the kitchen, through dark corridors because the generators have not come on yet, shining my torch ahead of me, find the cook, wake him up, give him some change, wait while he fills a saucepan with water, boils it, finds the coffee, and then annoy him with my request for sugar. She takes sugar. See how much I have learnt? Janine did not. I don’t think I would have felt like doing all that for Janine. At least not at the end.

  Later, we are going into the city together, looking for stories, looking for messed-up lives and broken dreams. Once we have dealt with that, perhaps it will be time to deal with our own messed-up lives. I hope so. I can’t wait to ask her how she feels. Whether she believes this is more than, well, more than what it has been, more than what it would seem to outsiders. I feel full of hope and bravado and excitement. The day is beginning, the world is new, this love is new, this love is strong. I feel like a teenager. Do you remember feeling like that? That energy, that madness, that over-the-top, no-reason exuberance. I haven’t felt that in a long time. I can’t believe it’s happening here, despite everything else.

  Here in this room, that is the feeling that surrounds me. I must grab this feeling and lock it away somewhere safe, so that when I am out there, where all hope seems to be gone, I can do my job properly. Thankfully, these ridiculously pompous photographer jackets we all wear have plenty of pockets, for hope, and love and later.

  I am glad we talked, Sel. I am sorry it was a little one-sided. I will post this on my way back to London. That way, when we speak, you will be ready to tear into me.

  Shaun

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  PETER

  I have come back to the beginning, or at least as close to the beginning as my limited human intellect can fathom. The plane cruised across the Mediterranean from Paris, then bumped over the vast Sahara desert, blank and dark, until finally, plunging through clouds, it fell towards the sun-sheened iron-roofed homes and we landed in Monrovia.

  I hadn’t been to Liberia since 2005. Then it was October, election time, the country was in a fever. I was in my own delirium, running away without making a move, open to possibilities because they would themselves destroy the budding certainty of my relationship with Michelle. If I behaved as I always did, I knew I would be free again. I was hungry for this freedom. I was also twenty-five, invicible, immortal and puffed up with the pride of a young man with an important job in an unknown land. Empires have been built from less but given there were no longer any empires to build, I opted for wanton destruction of my own life. I am here now to sift through the rubble, but I am very late. Maybe too late.

  I got a taxi from Robertsfield, a squat-bummed yellow car with one jaunty blue door and a driver who held my hand too long and my bags
too carelessly. When I was last in Monrovia, the rain lashed down for hours, the roads were slick and treacherous and the very air seemed pregnant with moisture, always about to give birth to another downpour. This time, the road from the airport was dry and the palm trees swayed in a sea-salted breeze that made me nostalgic for something I couldn’t name. I couldn’t be nostalgic for Monrovia. I had only ever spent a few weeks here. This was not my home. I looked out at the almost obscene explosion of green, stretching towards the low mountains on the horizon, as my driver asked me about ‘the purpose of your visit’. It was a good question. I had written ‘tourism’ on the form at the airport, but that was a lie. Business was not right either. Redemption might be more accurate but I didn’t fancy explaining that to the forbidding immigration officials.

  Monrovia has not changed much. A little more ragged, a few obvious attempts to stem the tide of time with look-at-me tall buildings and even new solar-powered street lamps, rising distant and aloof above women balancing bundles of life’s necessities on their heads. I looked for her as we drove deeper into the city, my eyes finding the right arm of every woman, checking and then moving on. Even if I had found her, I’m not sure what I would have done.

  Selena had taken me to see Shaun’s grave in the Grandview Cemetery, a place of softly winding paths between towering trees that linked the earth to the sky. Shaun was buried with his parents.

  Shaun Ridge July 9, 1951 – April 23, 1980.

  From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity.

  “I chose the quote,” Selena said, as we stood there, two strangers mourning different men – a brother and a father whose life had been reduced to one handwritten letter on yellowing paper stamped with the words Ducor Hotel. I didn’t know what to feel. I felt sad for the young man in the photo, whose road ran out too soon. I felt sad for myself, but what right had I to demand anything from this man? I did not know him, he did not know me. It was nobody’s fault. And finally, I felt sad for my mother because I now knew that her dreams, however wispy and unformed, had been buried with this man. Standing at that graveside, I understood, for the first time, my mother, her strange moods, her bitterness, and now her exile in Mogadishu. She would never use such flamboyant language, of course. She is made of tougher stuff than me.

  After leaving Colorado, I headed for Europe, pausing briefly in Washington to speak to Don. He was in the office he rarely used because he preferred to be in the busy newsroom, standing impatiently behind his desk, his right hand beating a frenetic SOS on his mouse.

  “Did you find him?”

  I nodded and sank into the chair in front of him.

  “My father, Tim, is dead. I’m going to Ireland for the funeral. I leave tonight.”

  Don ceased his tapping. He stood for a minute as if unsure what to do. His heavy hands hung by his side. His face furrowed, the ever-present wrinkles deepening and darkening like a storm.

  “I’m sorry, Peter. Is Nina going?”

  “No,” I said. “She doesn’t want to. She is staying in Mogadishu. I think she is happy.”

  It would be trite to say my mother had changed. That wasn’t it. It wasn’t my ordeal, or her ordeal in searching for me, or even that earlier ordeal in Monrovia. She had simply come to the end of one road, taken another, and was moving forward. She was happy.

  “I need to be happy too, I think. I am tired of searching and trying to understand things that were written before I was even born. I need to take what I have now, and go to a new place. I think I need to start again, Don.”

  Once again, my words skipped ahead of my mind, or maybe I mean my heart. The idea had been there, lurking around the edges of those amorphous days in Colorado. I had just not shaped the thought with the appropriate words. I had not let it out, but it had escaped, running to Don, the only father figure left to me.

  He nodded and came round the desk, putting an arm around my shoulders, a clumsy gesture all the more endearing for its gaucheness. I felt I should comfort him. He had been through it all with us, we had all made him carry our burdens, he even knew about Esther and Godwin. He bore our secrets with grace. Even now, he did not pry, he did not question, and he did not judge. He just sat with me, until it was time to go.

  As I left the building, he told me I had a job anytime I wanted.

  “I don’t think I’m going to do this anymore,” I said. “I don’t think I have any curiosity left. I want the small things, Don. I crave silence and peace, and a long, fucking boring life doing very little.”

  We laughed then, newsmen again marveling at a life that wasn’t dictated by deadlines and headlines. I knew he didn’t believe me.

  Two days later, I stood alongside Tim’s sister, Bernadette, and a damp huddle of heavy-coated silent men and women in a graveyard just two miles from the cottage where my father’s big heart had finally given up. An overly sharp sun, sulkily making up for its lack of warmth with an eye-watering frigid glare, cast gimlets of gold onto the waves, while the wind whipped the bald priest’s words from his mouth, tossing them over the low stone wall, across the sand and into the sea. I didn’t need to hear them. I had spoken little myself since arriving, and even my normally effusive aunt seemed not to know what to say or do with me; the gangly son of her brother, who was not even actually that and never had been, an almost-stranger who had been broken in a land she had barely heard of. The cousins I once played with – her three sons – and their friends were the same, and different. A heaviness around the jaw, hair not quite where it should be, a slight thickening of the limbs. Nothing too dramatic yet, but almost more poignant for that – these barely there changes were the sly harbingers of age, and death, undeniable here on the edge of the sea.

  How did we all end up here, when just moments ago we were down on the sand, cart-wheeling, cursing, thumping and whining as the man now in the box followed us along, laughing softly to himself? After I dropped a handful of clay on his oak coffin, I turned to the beach. I wanted to see him there, one last time, instead of holding that image of him lying in the coffin the night before, waxy and empty. I would not have recognised him in that box, but I could see him now, down on the sand, picking flat pebbles so he could teach me how to skim. I would never have a father now. It’s a simple thought, an obvious one, but so shocking. I would never have a father, and that would never change. I think it was at that moment, looking down at an empty beach and seeing the ghost of a man I now knew I had loved more than any other person, it was at that moment that I decided to go and find my own son. I left Ireland the next day.

  I needn’t have hurried, of course. Liberian bureaucracy doesn’t care about your issues or about your epiphanies. And neither do the French. It took several weeks to get a visa, and to tidy up my few affairs. I spent my time drifting below consciousness in my mother’s flat and then wandering Paris by night – past the Hotel de Ville, along the Seine, through the courtyard of the Louvre, down to Place de la Concorde, up the Champs-Élysées, jostled by excited tourists or snarled at by young men who had ridden the metro to gawk at the splendour and excess of the city. I didn’t mind being jostled. I was walking to fill the time. I had no destination in mind. I just wanted the colour of the city, its heartbeat to rise up through the concrete into my own shell so that I could stop thinking for an hour or two. It also helped me sleep, especially after stopping for a few cognacs in the anonymous bars along the Rue Montorgueil on the way home. I got to know the barmen the way one always knows barmen.

  Finally the fog lifted, and after the weeks of half-life, I surged into action like a man rising from his own coffin just before the lid is nailed down after some terrible medical error. Now I am here in Monrovia.

  I had an address from the payments I used to send. She was living in the western part of the city, north of Broad Street, and close enough to the Mesurado River to smell it on a heavy day. Like today. I asked the taxi to drop me on the main road – I needed to compose my thoughts and my toothless driver’s chatter
about rising prices, water shortages and the perfidy of the ruling class was not helping. I thought I could probably find the house on my own. I had a vague idea of the direction after pouring over maps before I boarded my flight in Paris. But how could I tell them why I had come when I couldn’t quite explain it to myself? And why should I expect them to accept me? I had little enough to offer – a broken spirit, a few thousand dollars, a bag of worn clothes, a few pictures, and an idea of redemption, which seemed ever more absurd as I pushed my way down a crowded side street, past hawkers selling charcoal, corn on the cob and shoes to fit all feet in a city of bare soles. I now kept my eyes down, partly to stop myself from tripping over the plastic bags, empty milk packets and bits of fruit peel, partly to stop myself making eye contact in a city that still shamed me, and my heartless, youthful self.

  Eventually, I had to ask for directions. I had veered off course, finding myself walking along the edge of a wasteland where a few boys were kicking a ball of twine around. A big-hipped seller of mangoes pointed me down the road, indicating a corner marked by a Coca-Cola emblazoned kiosk. “The family there. I know the brothers, but her, I don’t know well. She stays alone.”

  I bought some mangoes, thanked her and headed off, the plastic bag of over-ripe fruit dangling from my hand. I felt a small smile tugging at the edge of my frazzled mind. Esther always did keep herself to herself.