Fractured: International Hostage Thriller

by Clàr NÕ Chonghaile

  I knocked loudly on the iron gate, feeling the eyes of men across the street boring into my sweaty back. This was big news here. Esther might have been a mysterious figure before. She would be notorious as the news of the white man’s arrival spread round the neighbourhood. Unsure if I was ready for this, or if she was, I knocked again.

  A young man opened the gate. He was thickset and sweaty in a dark blue T-shirt and oil-stained jeans, but despite the stocky build, he had touches of Esther around the eyes, which opened now in surprise.

  “I am Peter Maguire. I have come to call on Esther, if she is willing to see me.”

  The young man – whom I now know as Joseph, a hardworking mechanic who will never forgive himself for not being able to defend his sister and mother in a forest in Sierra Leone when he was just a boy, and who drowns that guilt each night in a bottle of palm wine – looked over his shoulder. Following his gaze, I saw them.

  They were sitting in front of a small brick house with a curtain for a door. The red lace fluttered in the evening breeze off the river, and caught the dying rays of the sun, casting a supernatural sheen over the tableau in front. Esther was seated on the dry ground, her legs straight before her, her head bent as a young boy traced patterns in the sand with a stick. Esther’s left arm was across the boy’s shoulder. They both looked up at the same time, and I knew she saw me. Esther’s eyes widened, she dropped her hand to her lap. I registered that the young man at the gate had stood aside. There was nothing between us now but a few short feet of dry, dusty earth and within it, everything.

  Slowly Esther rose. She dusted her skirt and flicked a hand over her hair and across the front of her emerald green shirt. The boy rose too, his small hand reaching for hers, his eyes fixed on my face. I thought he knew who I was. She must have told him. She would have had to, I now realised with a shock, looking at his paler hand in her brown one. For a moment, the full extent of my responsibility caught my breath, stopping it in my throat, so that my feet stopped too.

  An old woman poked her head out of a traditional mud hut built next to the brick house. She squinted into the dying sun, uttered a throaty gasp and fled inside again. I could feel Joseph behind me. We stood like this, a fractured family in a setting sun, for a while. We might have stood like that for ever, but Esther knew what to do.

  “You are here, Peter,” she said. “You have come to visit us?” She shook her head slightly as soon as the words were out, as if she regretted them. She lowered her eyes and stood waiting for me to answer.

  And finally, I knew what to say. I knew it because she had spoken, she had broken the spell and given me a place, and a role, and a purpose. I was a visitor. And I could be more.

  “I would like to stay,” I said. “I would like Godwin to know his father.”

  Esther smiled and looked down at the boy. I did not know then whether or not he understood me. He told me later that he did but that he did not dare answer. He was afraid I had made a mistake. He was afraid he had made a mistake. He was unsure what to make of this ‘military man, the pale visitor’, as he called me.

  The old lady came rushing out of her hut again on swollen feet. She muttered something at Esther, who lowered her head again, but I caught a hint of a smile.

  “My mother is angry that I am treating you so badly. I have let you stand in the sun. She says I have dishonoured her. You must come and sit in the shade, and then we can talk.”

  “Does she know who I am?” I asked, feeling Esther’s smile sneak onto my face. Godwin was staring harder now, his head turning from his flapping grandmother to his smiling mother to the pale stranger standing before him.

  “I don’t think so. But you are white and she is ashamed. She says she will see me later, so you cannot leave now, or I will be alone with her anger.

  Joseph brought a white plastic chair and set it in the shade under the single tree in the compound. I suddenly remembered the mangoes. I handed them to the old lady. She laughed and gestured to the chair. Another man arrived. Esther introduced him as her brother Tobias. He also lived in this small compound in a second brick house, with his wife and four children. I sat in the chair, surrounded by mystified strangers. Esther brought Godwin to me.

  “Godwin, shake hands with your father.”

  He stretched out his little hand and I took it in mine. And that was the start of our story.

  I stayed in that compound for a few weeks, sleeping on a spare mattress in the one-room shed where Joseph collapsed each night. I drank palm wine with him, played with Godwin and Tobias’ children, and sat in companionable silence with the old lady, who would pat my shoulder every so often and smile at me.

  Eventually, we moved to a house by the sea. It’s near the West Point Football Field. If you turn to the right while standing on our little beachside verandah, you face Sierra Leone. Straight ahead is the rest of the world. Our house is like a bridge that leads from the city to the ocean – from land to sea, from chaos to peace. From the narrow hall, you enter the main room, and here already you can see the water. You cross in a few steps, going around the gaudy sofa, past Esther’s sewing machine and Godwin’s small desk, and then through the back door onto the verandah, where the sea’s heartbeat drowns out the noise of the city.

  On our first night, after Esther had put Godwin to bed, his skin still slick with the sweat of excitement, we sat in the main room, close together on the old sofa. I put my arm around Esther, tentatively. She did not pull away. It was the first time we had been truly alone since I arrived. As the waves hummed faintly in the background, I began to speak. I told Esther of Somalia, but my time there felt distant, as though it belonged to someone else. Strange how those few weeks already felt so unreal. I knew I sounded false, hesitant as I described those events, and yet they had defined my life. They just did not ring true. The words didn’t fit. Maybe it will come.

  I told Esther how my mother had decided to stay. I spoke of Tim, and here I cried. Then, I told her of Shaun Ridge, and his letter, and the story I had decided I was going to write.

  But still I had not spoken of us. I stroked Esther’s braided hair, and bent to kiss her stump, as I had before.

  “Godwin does that. Every morning. He asks me if it pains, and then I say yes, and then he kisses it to make the pain go away.” She spoke in a soft voice, as if the waves could overhear us.

  “He is a good boy,” I said. “You have raised him well.”

  “Thank you,” she said. “They call him ‘the bright boy’. It is not meant to be kind, but I think it is. He is my bright boy, and maybe he can be yours.”

  “It would be an honour,” I said.

  We fell into silence again. I would’ve liked to stay silent but this woman deserved more.

  “I have never spoken the truth, Esther, because I have never known it. I’m not sure I know it now. I’m not sure I even believe in truth any more. I am tired of ideals. I am tired of absolutes.”

  I was speaking rapidly, the words tumbling out, rushing to give form to ideas that were eager to skip away unfettered.

  “I remember, on the beach, I told you I could love you and love another. I thought that was so. It is not. And I am not that person anymore either.”

  Esther lowered her eyes. I lifted her chin and turned her face to mine. Her smile was bright, hopeful yet desperate not to appear too hopeful.

  “I do not want to speak of love,” I said. “I don’t know what it means. I don’t know what anything means now. All the words I have used have been wrong. I feel like I have been living in a different language, and I did not realise it until now. I need to learn again.”

  I paused. I had more to say, but I could not think of how. She took my hand and lifted it to her cheek. Then she put it down and placed her fingers over my lips. She did all this slowly.

  “We have time to talk, Peter. We have time to learn, together, here in this house.”

  We sat in silence on that sagging couch until we fell asleep in each other’s arms. Two people in a
house on the sea, with a little boy dreaming to the sound of never-ending waves.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  PETER

  My name is Peter Maguire. Today is August 10th, 2012. I am sitting on the edge of Africa, where the land meets the Atlantic Ocean. I am writing, so I shall say I am a writer. I am a father. I am a son. I am free.

  The sea is hissing again, a reassuring sound that is soothing rather than sinister, and rain-swollen clouds are gathering above the horizon. Godwin and Esther will be home from school soon. My son, our son, will crash through the door from the street, I will hear the thud of his bag in the room behind me, and the squeak of the screen door, and shouts of “Father, Father, I am here”.

  He will run to me as I sit here on the verandah, but he will not hug me. We are not there yet. He will run across these sandy, wooden boards with his too-heavy new shoes, his face bright and wet above his canary-yellow shirt. And my son, my sun will be back.

  He will tell me of his day, of his teacher, of his friends. I will stop typing. Esther will appear behind me, place a hand on my head as if to measure the intensity of the vibrations inside, as if trying to get a sense of today’s turmoil. She will bring me coffee. I will take the NYC mug, and then Godwin and I will walk onto the beach, searching for shells, and sticks, and the detritus of the sea, to decorate the shelves I have placed along the verandah for this purpose. On one shelf, in pride of place, stands an undamaged sea urchin shell, lavender fading to green, achingly pretty and fragile. That one I found alone. I have varnished it. Its survival has become a totem.

  On the day I found the shell, a few months after I arrived, I had run frantically onto the beach. It was raining with pellet-like drops spattering the sand. Thunder rumbled above the churning waves. I welcomed the climatic fury, turning my face up to the rain, wanting the sting of physical pain. I wanted to forget what I had just seen. I opened my eyes wide, as if the rain could wash the images away. I had come here to escape.

  I had not been able to write for some days. Writer’s block, I suppose, but that isn’t quite right. I was not blocked as a writer, but as a man. I was trying to remember my captivity, that room with the monster’s teeth outside Mogadishu. But the picture was already faded. My memories found hiding places, curling themselves up like cats on warm duvets. I dug deeper, finding nothing, grasping at the phrases I had doled out to the suited men in Nairobi. But how could I write about something I could not clearly remember? I tried a few sentences. They were flat, devoid of emotion, as though I was writing about something I had read about in the newspapers.

  I sought inspiration on the Internet. The connection is patchy here, but after several tries it kicked in and suddenly my verandah sped out across the sea, into the world. I typed Somalia into Google News.

  Somalia Theatre Bombing Kills Top Sports Officials was the first headline I read. A young woman had blown herself up in the newly opened National Theatre during a speech by the Somali prime minister to mark the first anniversary of the launch of a national television channel.

  I read and read. Devoured every article on the attack. I felt drawn to the descriptions, hungry for detail. I found a video from inside the theatre on YouTube. It took ten minutes to load, stopping and starting, and endlessly buffering.

  Finally, an image appeared. The prime minister, a small, slightly pudgy man with the look of an accountant, was speaking. Then, there was a sharp bang. Behind the prime minister, men in suits and sunglasses flinched away from the podium, heads down, hands up. The camera panned away. Blue and white plastic chairs had been overturned. Smoke and screams filled the small box on my screen. But then the camera moved to a smear of blood and empty sandals.

  The video ended after just fifty seconds. I sought out more. Fear was awakening in me, and wanted to fully embrace it. I thought somehow that would unlock my own memories of horror and despair. I played the blast over and over again, jolting each time it boomed out from the computer. I relished the fearful anticipation.

  I think it was on the third video I watched. It had been uploaded by a Somali news agency and eschewed the soft-stomached censorship we seem to favour on international media outlets. It makes sense – horror is only unbroadcastable horror if you have not seen it before. If you have lived it, and live it everyday, it is just news, not the stuff of nightmares.

  Abdi was lying on this back, among the scattered chairs. He looked as though he was sleeping, as long as you did not focus on the chunk bitten from his chest by a greedy piece of shrapnel.

  His face was untouched. His almond-shaped eyes stared sightlessly from beneath the arched eyebrows. His delicate lips were slightly open, as if he had been about to say something. His arms were undamaged, long fingers splayed on the ground, as if he was feeling the soil one last time. He was dressed in the uniform of the Somali National Army. Below the mess of flesh and bone, one foot was intact, knobbly toes in a red flip flop.

  The camera panned away. I hit pause. I ran onto the beach, into the rain, towards the waves. On that beach, on that day, I decided it was too much. Of course, I had been moving towards this realisation for months. My decision to move to Monrovia was always a plaster on an open wound. It was not the solution, merely an attempt to live again.

  But when I saw Abdi’s shattered body, I decided this attempt to redefine myself through my accidental family was not going to work. I had never been truly convinced it would. It was something to do. A time-consuming task to give the illusion of purpose. With Abdi’s death, the scales fell from my eyes. I wanted out.

  I waded into the water. When it rose to my knees, I stopped. I remembered Abdi striding away from me at the AMISOM base, after we had been rescued. Had I cared enough then? If I had cared more, could I have persuaded him? How much of that young man’s death was my responsibility? Was I too eager, as he said then, to return to my life. And for what? I had left it all behind to start again. No more.

  As the waves crashed into me, sending fingers of cold creeping above my ribs, towards my neck, over my heart, I thought again of Guled, and his son, Ahmed, and a blood-red sunset over a technicolour road in the middle of nowhere.

  I needed oblivion. It was my fault, and not my fault. I didn’t have the energy to draw the line in the sand that would allow me to separate the story from me. I started wading out again. It seemed easier just to keep walking, to let my body alone experience this moment. I focused on my feet. I became the struggle against the waves. I welcomed the spray hitting my face, blinding my eyes and sending goosebumps along my arms. I could walk for ever.

  Then, the softest part of my soft white man’s foot scraped against something sharp, and as the man in me lost his footing, the boy in me lost his focus. I bent down and pushed my head under the furious waves, my hands scrabbling at the sand. I was dragged under. My ears filled with noise as my lungs emptied. In that moment, I could not go gracefully. My fingers closed over a shell and I started flailing, legs kicking, arms windmilling as I sought the surface. I was rolled and rocked by the covetous waves. They wanted me now, they had believed my promise to keep walking. I scraped the bottom, felt my knees graze the brittle sand and a sharp pain in my elbow. Angered by my U-turn, the sea spat me out, and I burst back into the world.

  I was on my knees in the shallows. I had the sea urchin cradled in my hand. I knelt there for a long time, looking at the glassy sand as it wriggled and seethed under the spent waves, until I heard Godwin’s voice calling me from the verandah. My son, my sun.

  Esther stood in the shadows, her arm half raised to me, as if unsure whether to call me. I lifted myself from the sea and trudged up the sand, my feet sinking like deadweights into the ochre softness.

  “It is the most beautiful shell I have ever seen,” Godwin said, as I stood dripping before him, my hands outstretched. “You are lucky to have found it, Father.”

  I would not call it luck. Luck is an absolute. You either have it or you don’t. It is too definitive. It implies we have no agency over our own destinies. Bu
t we do, up to a point. We do not deserve absolution, but neither are we totally innocent. If Abdi had chosen to let me help him, he might have been saved. But could he make that choice, given what had happened to Nadif, to his mother, to his father? Their choices, and their resulting fates, limited his world, hemmed him in by creating a web spun from character, chance and history. We are not as free as we think, but even the prisoner can choose when to eat, when to sleep, and, sometimes, when to die.

  My mother called a week after Abdi’s death. She is still in Mogadishu, still seeking peace in a place that did not know her before. In Mogadishu, she is Mama Nina. That is all. Not Nina the journalist. Not Nina the adultress. Not Nina the bereaved.

  “You saw?” she asked as soon as I answered.

  “Yes.”

  “There was nothing to be done. He came to us too late.”

  “He was dead at the theatre,” I said. “I saw a video. He looked older, and harder, but he was still wearing the same sandals. I guess they provide their own shoes in the Somali army.”

  “I saw him, you know,” she said. “In March. He came to the Medina hospital with a young woman. She had been hit by shrapnel when a car exploded beside a bus at K4. Abdi brought her to Robert, the Ugandan doctor here. He treated her. Afterwards, Robert said Abdi had saved her life. Her upper thigh had been pierced. She would have bled to death if he had not acted so fast. Robert patted him on the shoulder. Abdi seemed proud, he smiled. He had a beautiful smile, Peter. I had not seen that before.”

  I had nothing to say so I said nothing.

  “I spoke to him too, just before he left. I asked if he was all right. A stupid question here, I know, but I don’t remember how to talk to young men. I was never very good at it, as I’m sure you remember.”

  I did. She wasn’t. But then, like all of us, she was always forced to recite lines from her own multi-authored script.