“He said he was well. He had joined the army, and had been trained for ten weeks by AMISOM. He was providing security around Villa Somalia and other government buildings. He was hoping to become part of the prime minister’s personal security detail. I guess that happened.”
“He got what he wanted then,” I said, too bitterly.
“I think he did, Peter. For the first time, I think he did. What happened, happened. But he was living the life he had chosen. That is important.”
My mother sounded calm. At ease. She had changed. She too had found what she wanted in Mogadishu. Or at least what she can now want, given the past.
I remained silent.
“And you? Are you living the life you want?” My mother’s voice was soft now.
It had been years since we had asked each other such questions. I wanted to brush it off, to bury it under a glib, flip phrase, but I find glibness much harder now.
“I am living. I am learning, and I am writing. I don’t know if that is what I want, Mum. How can I tell what I want when I am not sure who I am yet? I have been so many things to so many people. I have been your son. I have been a dream to a dead man, a lie to a live one. I have been a captive, and a free man. A journalist and a story. I am the nephew of a retired teacher in Colorado. I am a father to a boy I barely know. I live with a woman who believes in silence, and yet I work with words.”
I paused, my heart racing. I was being sucked under by the waves again. My fingers were clenched so hard on the phone they were aching.
From across Africa, from the shores of another sea, my mother answered.
“You are a man, Peter. That is all.” She paused. “I did not make life easy for you, but neither was it easy for me. We are all broken pieces of a mirror. A broken mirror’s cracks are its own, but the images within are from elsewhere. Does the mirror choose what it reflects? I don’t know, Peter. I don’t know. We are what we are, and we must make do. That is the secret.”
I heard her chuckle, or perhaps it was a strangled sob, and for a second, I could see her clearly, her light hair in the breeze, as it was when I took off from Mogadishu airport by the Indian Ocean.
“Do you love your child?” she asked.
“I am learning to.”
“Then you are making a good start. Don’t fight the questions, Peter. They will always be there. Try to answer them, and if you cannot, know that living in uncertainty is all there is. At least, for now. Maybe clarity comes with death. If it does, I will try to find a way to let you know.”
I have not spoken to my mother since then. She sends the occasional email, and photographs for Godwin. One shows her sitting with Robert at a plastic table in front of the sea. There are two bottles of Coke on the table. This excited Godwin.
“Is it her birthday? Or his birthday?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “Grown ups can drink as much Coke as they like. If they can pay for it.”
His face lit up. Life was beautiful, and the future was brighter than ever, full of endless bottles of Coke on beaches in foreign countries with fascinating people.
I have also been in touch with Selena. I told her I had come to Monrovia. She sent me two photographs taken by Shaun. One shows a teenage boy, arms outstretched with joy, face beaming, celebrating Doe’s coup. The boy looks like Godwin did when he heard of the limitless Coke. It is heartbreaking because of this. The second is from Sierra Leone, chosen for Esther, I’m sure. When Selena said Shaun had been to Freetown, I told her what had happened to Esther. The photograph she sent is one of Shaun’s. He never witnessed what Sierra Leone became, and so he could still see the beauty. The photo shows the Cape Lighthouse in Freetown, silhouetted against a golden explosion of cloud and sun rays at the end of the day.
When I showed it to Esther, she held it daintily with her fingertips and looked for a long time.
“It is beautiful. I have never been to that place.”
“We will go,” I said on impulse, and suddenly, I meant it. It was the first time I had acknowledged the possibility of a future, since I had arrived.
Esther looked up and flashed her radiant smile, the one that didn’t mean she was happy, or that she necessarily believed you.
“I would like that,” she said.
Selena sent another photograph this week. She said she had found it while sorting through her attic. She and her husband are planning to move to New York to be closer to Maria, who gave up her passion to go to Afghanistan, and has now lost her bearings. I did speak to her after all, and I suppose I dissuaded her. In any case, I took action. It was my first intervention since leaving Somalia, since Abdi took my arm, and led me from the compound back to the world. With Maria, I was wary, afraid to say too much. I am still wary. Life has proved itself a malicious and vindictive adversary. I am still waiting for the other shoe to drop. But I acted.
This third photograph is of Shaun and my mother. On the back in faded blue ink, someone scribbled: Nina Walters, Shaun Ridge, Monrovia, April 1980. The quality is poor. This was a print man’s photograph, I thought. Perhaps Don took it. Or some other hack.
My mother and father are sitting in a dim, candlelit restaurant. The picture is tightly framed, their upper bodies fill the shot. My mother faces the camera, but she is looking at Shaun, who is seated on her right. She is smiling at something he said, and her eyes are fixed on his face. His profile is animated, soft in the near-dark, his hands are empty, and one is reaching towards Nina. I wonder if he was about to stroke her hair, caress her face, or if his body was two steps ahead of his mind at that point. There is a complicity in the closeness of their heads, a mutual understanding in their bodies.
After the photograph arrived, I found my rucksack and removed the one album I took with me on this journey. I took out a photograph of Tim and I, playing in the waves on a summer holiday in Cork. I was about nine. My cousin Joe took the photo. My father was happy, happier than he had been for many years before. His voice rang out as we jumped over the waves, seaweed snaggling our legs.
“Higher, Peter! Jump for it. Thatta boy!”
I brought the photo out to my table on the verandah at the edge of the world. I put it beside the picture from Selena. And I called my son. Esther followed. I rose, and gestured to her to sit. Godwin perched on her lap.
“These are your grandfathers, Godwin,” I said. “Tim and Shaun.”
My bright boy picked up the photographs, holding them side by side.
“Who is the lady?”
“That is your grandmother. You have not met her yet, but you will, inshallah.”
My boy looked confused. Esther raised her eyes from the photographs, and searched my face. Her smile, this time, was understanding.
“Your father is about to tell you a great story,” she said. “It is the story of this family. It is the beginning of your story, of our story.”
“And in this story,” I continued, reaching out to grasp Esther’s hand, “we will also meet Abdi, a young Somali man who saved my life. One day, we may go to Somalia so that you can see where he was from. There are many footsteps to follow, Godwin. We will have to start slow, and small.”
Esther started to rise.
“No, please.” I laid a hand on her good arm. “Please, listen. I want to tell you both.”
“I am not leaving,” she said. “I want you to tell the story while we walk on the beach. That way, the waves will hear it too.”
We walked onto the sand, Godwin, Esther and me. And I started to tell my son about my fathers, and the woman who loved them, and the man who saved me. The waves listened, and caught my words in nets of spray, dragging them far out to sea.
INTERVIEW WITH THE AUTHOR
When and why did you start writing? How important was the research?
I’ve been writing forever. I wrote my first, and until now, only book when I was 10 or 11. It was about a little bear and Jack Frost. I wrote it on copybook pages and drew pictures in the top half of each page. I knew nothing so I sent it o
ff to a very high-profile publisher. They kindly replied and said ‘it was not quite right for their lists’. Even kinder, they added a postscript, gently pointing out that manuscripts were ‘usually typed’.
Later, I wrote many short stories, poems and, after I became a journalist, endless articles. For years, fact overtook fiction, while often outdoing it. Then, when I was on maternity leave in Dakar, Senegal, after the birth of my first daughter, I started this book. I made great progress until she started crawling and popped a live phone jack in her mouth while I was typing. She is now 11. That’s how long it took. I feel like this book and my daughter have grown up together. Of course, I was not writing Fractured all that time, and just as my daughter has changed from a fuzzy-haired cherub into an oh-so-sophisticated nearly-teenager, my book has gone through some major changes of its own.
The research was important but not cumbersome. This book is fiction and I really embraced the freedom that entailed. I have been to Somalia, Liberia, and Sierra Leone, and I have lived in Abidjan, Paris, Nairobi and London. I did try to make sure the historical incidents and geographical descriptions were as accurate as possible. But this isn’t really a book about places, or politics, or history. It’s a book about people, chance and the choices we are allowed to make.
Your novel is split into three narratives – Peter the journalist, Nina the mother and Abdi the soldier. How did you come up with these characters, and do you see any aspects of yourself in any of them?
The characters came with the story. Peter is my everyman, my flawed hero. He’s a journalist because, I suppose, I know journalists. But what’s really important is that he is an ordinarily complex man in an extraordinary situation. He is handsome, but callous. He is fickle but not malicious. He lives in that moral netherworld where most of us reside. I wanted to explore the world that lies behind clean narratives; the reality of life where there are no certainties. Like Nina, I have always been fascinated by random events, the effect they have, and the way we try to impose structure on them. I love the anecdote, which I mention in the novel, about how if Lord Halifax had not chosen to go to the dentist on a particular afternoon in 1940, Winston Churchill might not have become prime minister, with all that implies for world events. As Paul Auster once said: “the world is governed by chance. Randomness stalks us every day of our lives”. I find the role of randomness in my own life both terrifying and exhilarating. I often wonder what would have happened if I had not wandered idly into the rather shabby careers office at Galway University one day in the 1990s, and discovered there was a news agency called Reuters. And that it took graduate trainees. In writing this novel, I wanted to see if I could capture this randomness in an artistic form usually employed to impose the unifying structure of a coherent narrative on this jumble of events that is life.
Nina predated this version of the novel – I always wanted to write about her, and at first she was my focus. But as the years passed, she grew and matured and then she had Peter, and I had my story. Abdi was the trickiest character, but also a critical one. I really like Abdi, and I feel he is truth in so many ways. Of course, you might say how could I possibly give voice to a Somali teenager. But it is really no different from any other fictional endeavour. I feel that Abdi makes everyone stand taller, and imagining him and listening to his voice was a thrilling writing experience.
There are elements of me sprinkled throughout these characters and others. It might just be a half-thought, or a gesture, or an idea. But I couldn’t possibly comment any further.
How do you feel Peter’s life has shaped his character? And Nina and Abdi?
I think Nina gets it spot on when she says Peter is not an easy man to know. He is an easy man to think you know. He is unsure of himself, and because of this, he tries to be the person he thinks he should be. He acts first, and then very deliberately doesn’t think later. What happens to him is partly his doing – falling for Esther and getting her pregnant – but the way he reacts may have more to do with this innate uncertainty about his true nature. And when he finds out Tim is not his father, the little certainty he had deserts him, and he is left floating free in a world without recognisable parameters.
I believe that we all write our own life scripts but the scope of our action and perhaps imagination is often invisibly hemmed in by choices other people have made. This is certainly the case for Nina – her life is shaped by those few days in Monrovia when, without any massive fanfare, she falls for Shaun. Her fall from grace is brief and brutal and there is no real reason. But that’s life. Abdi’s restrictions are more graphic, more inescapable. He grows up in a conflict, and it takes its toll on his family, shearing away the options that normally offer themselves to a young man.
Each character makes mistakes – although Abdi is the most innocent. Each character reacts to random events because of character and circumstance. And there are no easy answers.
Having lived in many different places, why did you decide to set your novel in Somalia?
I think Somalia chose me. After four years in West Africa, we left Dakar for London. My second daughter was born, and I didn’t have a moment to think, or a thought worth thinking for a couple of years. And when I next had a moment to myself, I was in Nairobi. I really don’t remember making an active decision to set the book in Somalia. It just happened. In fact, I remember saying, somewhat incredulously, to my husband: “It’s in Somalia now. Not Liberia. I don’t know how that happened.”
I was fascinated by Somalia, and indeed I still am. There’s a sharpness in its history and its present and the combination of great tragedies, and personal horror and famine and heroism. And to explore the terrorism angle, which is a tangential theme in Fractured but does speak to the freedom we have to choose our lives, I needed a place like Somalia. And by now, I was living in East Africa and it was real to me.
And finally, the book deals with topical themes such as captivity, the motivations of fundamentalists and the challenges of journalism, what do you plan on approaching for your next novel?
I have started my next book, tentatively and in my usual stop-start fashion, and this time I want to explore some ideas about addiction and obsession. The story is set in Dublin, which ironically I do not know as well as some of the places in Fractured. I grew up in County Galway on the other side of Ireland, and I never had much occasion to go to Dublin when I was growing up. I know it only as a tourist. So I guess I might need to do a recce but it should be a little simpler than getting into Mogadishu. My novel is again centred on a man, but this time a Rwandan who moved to Ireland after the 1994 genocide and gets involved in the city’s drug scene. His friendship with a middle-aged woman who washes the dishes in a restaurant where they both work will lead to tragedy and acute self-knowledge. He and she will have to confront their own addictions: to the past, to abusive relationships, to the various destructive needs that drive them forward. And Ireland’s own obsession with the obvious consumption of the Celtic Tiger years will also be a theme. I hope this next book won’t take 11 years.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am deeply grateful to Lauren Parsons and Legend Press for taking a chance on this story. And special thanks to Lauren for her superb editing.
Thank you to Lucy Lamble and the team at the Guardian for supporting my trips and tales in East Africa, and for giving me a berth when I came back to London. And to all the editors and colleagues down the years who taught me what to ask, how to write and where to cut.
Thank you and cheers to the ladies of the Nairobi Book Club for making me laugh, pouring me wine, and always pushing me to keep at the book.
Eternal gratitude to my parents, sisters and brothers for their support, love, sheets and tea towels.
Thank you to all the people who helped me in Mogadishu, and to those who opened the doors of their lives to me in Somalia and elsewhere.
And finally, thank you to Lucy and Rachel: our gorgeous daughters and constant sources of light, hope, happiness and “hairy erics”. And to Davi
d: a staunch believer, a patient listener, a gentle wielder of the red pen, and a shrewd observer. He is also, incidentally, a wonderful husband.
Thanks a million everyone.
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Fractured: International Hostage Thriller Page 24