Dear Beneficiary

by Janet Kelly

  ‘Cheers, mate,’ I could hear from behind the screen.

  By this time I was sluicing myself with water from the can, which I noted had been warmed, although the heat during the day was almost suffocating. Gowon handed me my own shower gel and shampoo, which he must have retrieved from my case. He gave it to me as if giving me a present, but I tried not to be cross with the gesture of handing me my own goods. He didn’t have to do that, I suppose, so I was grateful for such tiny home comforts. The smell of the gel reminded me of my bathroom at home and I wondered if anyone had thought to go and water my plants.

  Tracey was singing ‘Somewhere over the Rainbow’ on the other side of the shack and I could hear the slapping of her flesh as she washed, an activity that seemed to be occupying all of her energy.

  I felt free to allow Gowon to move his hand around my body as he wanted to. It reminded me of Darius and how he’d thrill my senses with his large, capable hands. He didn’t have a huge amount in common with him, other than the colour of his skin and country of birth, but they did both have clean fingernails. There’s something about that level of hygiene in a man that’s very attractive.

  ‘What is it you do to me, Cynthia?’ said Gowon as he reached down into my knickers, where he caressed the tops of my thighs, prising them apart with a tightened fist. He rubbed gently, moving more slowly each time towards an ache which had been developing since his first touch. He spent some time using the middle finger of his right hand to excite me and I was conscious of his cleanliness in that department. I may not have been so willing had he shown signs of grubbiness. When I thought I was going to have to beg, he slipped his finger inside me, moving it rigorously up and down until I felt my knees buckle with pleasure. I could see his erection beneath his combat trousers but decided to do nothing about it – and he didn’t seem to expect anything.

  Strangely satisfied and wondering why imprisonment and potential jeopardy excited me, I allowed him to dry me with my own towel before I got dressed.

  ‘Thank you very much,’ I said, and I think I meant it.

  Tracey emerged from her private area and Gowon snapped back into professional mode. Instead of leading us back to our own shack he told us to get dressed and then walked us to the front of the settlement.

  ‘Hey, where are you taking us, big boy?’ said Tracey, doing the usual thing with her wet hair.

  ‘The boss man wants to see you,’ he answered, before leading us to the guards’ shack.

  ‘Good morning, my ladies,’ greeted Chike, who was lounging in a large armchair and watching a small television screen that was playing cartoons. ‘How are you today?’

  ‘Fine, thank you very much,’ I answered, ‘Although we’d really like to know when we’re going to be released.’

  ‘Ha ha!’ said Chike. ‘That is the twenty-million-dollar question! You might as well ask me how many mobile phones are in the sea or whether Jesus had bunions. You are very funny!’

  He stood up quickly and banged his fist on what passed for a table in front of him. It was actually a door balanced on two cut-down oil drums and wasn’t secure – so the contents of his mug went flying across his side of the room, adding to the stains on the front of his combat trousers. He kicked the mug away as he walked round the shack.

  ‘Your people are very slow. They do not understand they need to pay us, and if they don’t you won’t be singing songs to your grandchildren!’

  Just as I was thinking that I’ve never been moved to sing a song to anyone, let alone my grandchildren, Tracey started to sob again. In the background the TV was blaring out What’s Up, Doc? which seemed appropriate, bearing in mind her clear need for some medical assistance for her hormone imbalance.

  ‘What is it you want from us?’ she said, having missed the obvious.

  ‘Your friends and family need to pay us what we have asked and you will be free to leave,’ added Chike, smiling his snarly smile.

  He moved across the room and stared into Tracey’s eyes while inching his body closer to her.

  ‘Personal space, if you don’t mind, mate. Get any closer and I’ll be brushing your teeth with me tongue,’ she said.

  ‘I am not interested in you,’ he said, spitting as he spoke. ‘You have nothing for me. Yet.’

  Then he moved to me.

  ‘You have an interesting family. I think you could be of much more use. Tell me about them.’

  I spotted beads of sweat forming on his brow and wondered how confident Chike was about getting what he wanted. I didn’t know what to say for fear of putting my children and grandchildren in jeopardy, but then I couldn’t see how I would do that just by giving these people basic information.

  ‘I have four grown-up children and a number of grandchildren, boys and girls. The oldest is eighteen and the youngest is five.’

  I couldn’t calculate quickly enough how many there were exactly, so I just hoped he didn’t ask for any more detail.

  Chike wasn’t listening. He was removing a cigarette from a packet that Tracey recognised as hers.

  ‘Help yourself, why don’t you?’ she said to him, shutting up after he handed her his lighted one and got another for himself. She took a deep drag and coughed.

  ‘Tom is your grandson, I believe?’

  How on earth does he know that? I thought.

  ‘And you have a friend called Bob and another called Darius,’ added Chike, looking menacingly at me. ‘You bank with NatWest and live in Surrey, England.’

  I felt like I was going to be sick, but as his words sank in my hopes rose. Darius must know where we are.

  ‘They need to hurry up with our fees for your release. They have three more days,’ he said.

  Tracey’s mouth fell open.

  ‘And then what?’ she asked.

  Chike laughed at her.

  ‘What do you think, my little yellow-haired friend? We have tea and talk nicely about books we have read or the politics of Africa? Maybe I could take you out for a nice dinner?’

  ‘You’re not my type,’ said Tracey, taking another puff on her cigarette before throwing the stub onto the floor, where Gowon crushed its life out.

  ‘I’m sure they’re doing everything possible,’ I said to Chike as calmly as I was able, which wasn’t easy as my legs had turned weaker than a new born foal’s and I felt I could drop to the floor at any moment. ‘My family will know what to do. They are very reliable and can be trusted to do the right thing.’ Usually.

  ‘They had better be, Mrs Cynthia Hartworth. We’re relying on them for our future and you are relying on them for yours. Let’s hope they are intelligent people who know what they have to do.’

  Tracey looked over at me and was as white as a sheet. I couldn’t work out if it was shock or the effects of the nicotine, the first she’d had for some time.

  ‘They’ll all be dealing with it professionally and properly,’ I said, hoping against hope that was true. I got the impression Chike was getting impatient, and although he hadn’t made any direct threats I wondered what his plans were in the event he didn’t get what he’d demanded. Would he get frustrated and take it out on us? I didn’t like the thought of what he might do and tried to prevent my mind playing out my untimely demise in full Technicolor. I’d heard of hostages being beheaded or shot, and wondered how much it would hurt. I visualised a bloody end and dismissed the vision as nothing more than panic. I couldn’t allow myself to think of such things.

  ‘You say you’ve been in touch with my family, and they’ll be doing everything in their power to secure my safe release,’ I added, wondering if I needed to cross my fingers.

  I knew Darius would come to find me but couldn’t work out how these people knew about Tom or why they would want to contact Bob, who I hadn’t seen in goodness knows how many years. Bob might have been keen for a meeting, but I didn’t think he’d be quite so committed if asked to cough up his life savings for my release. It would be an interesting test of his intentions, however.

  ‘W
hat fees have you asked for?’ I asked, but didn’t get a reply. I hoped they were reasonable and could be met from the funds I was expecting from Darius.

  Chike slumped heavily back into his chair and turned the volume up on the television, indicating our meeting was over. Tracey’s cigarette had caused a major coughing fit. Her eyes were watering and she was still sniffing from her previous sobbing, so Gowon handed her a tissue. I noticed the distinctive National Trust print on the packet, which gave away the fact it had been liberated from my handbag, wherever that was.

  ‘I’ll take you back,’ Gowon said quietly.

  Once we were on our own I processed the information we’d just been given; I couldn’t understand it, although I was confident that we weren’t going to be in captivity for very much longer. These people had been in touch with my family, so it was only a matter of time before something happened to finish this entire episode. Tracey wasn’t so sure.

  ‘They’re just messing with your head. They probably looked you up on Google or something and got details of your family,’ she said.

  ‘That doesn’t explain how they found out about Bob, who I have only been in touch with a couple of times by email – or my grandson. He’s not even on the electoral list yet so he doesn’t exist,’ I said, more to myself than her. ‘But if they know about Darius, he must know about us and where we are.’

  ‘Let’s bloody hope so,’ said Tracey.

  Some hours later, as the night drew in, we could hear shouting and car doors banging. We couldn’t see if people were coming or going, but guessed by the increasing volume from our captors’ shack that the numbers were increasing. We hadn’t been given any supper and both of us were hungry, which is what made Tracey a bit tetchy.

  We both tried to look out of any gaps in our shack walls to see what was going on but other than the occasional flash of light when car doors were opened and closed there was nothing to be seen that gave any clues to the activity.

  We’d just about given up on getting any food when Gowon brought us the usual round of eggs and our night cap, which we were grateful for. He also pulled out a packet of pine nuts from his pocket and placed them in front of me.

  ‘A present from my brother, he brought them to me today. They are for you,’ he said.

  ‘That is very kind,’ I said, and wondered if I could extract any further favours.

  ‘We do appreciate your help as it gets very dull trying to pass the days in here,’ I said to him. ‘It would be really good to have some newspapers or more magazines, and I’m sure you’re the man who can get them for us.’

  Gowon visibly swelled with the compliment and I felt sure he’d do what he could to help us, particularly after he blew me a kiss on his way out of the shack.

  ‘Leave it with me,’ he said.

  The nuts made a change, and although Tracey complained they were getting stuck on the metal pin that used to be a tooth, she was happy enough to share them with me.

  ‘He’s a bit young for you, ain’t he?’ Tracey said after another game of ‘pin the tail on the donkey’ which we’d fashioned using one of Tracey’s earrings and a picture of David Beckham, torn from OK! magazine.

  ‘That would be a matter of opinion,’ I replied. The washing rituals had become more exciting as time went on. Gowon seemed to want little in terms of his own physical satisfaction, and was a gentleman in the truest sense of the word. I suspected he’d been brought up around women or animals, as he had a definite nurturing side. It might even be a Nigerian thing, as Darius was equally attentive, unless I was comparing all men to Colin, whose knowledge of female anatomy was limited to scratching around my genitals with warty hands and a definite sense of impatience.

  Even though it took enforced captivity to produce a peculiar and unplanned physical relationship with yet another young Nigerian, I admitted to quite liking the activity, although I was getting concerned about how I was going to get out of the place. There was only so much fascination dalliances with a stranger could provide when faced with a lifetime of incarceration, or worse.

  In the meantime it made sense to welcome the sexually charged distraction, as life stuck in an African hut with a woman with negligible conversation and an increasingly bad mood brought on by enforced nicotine withdrawal, was beginning to pall.

  ‘You’re a good-looking woman ‘n’ all that, but I don’t get what he’d see in yer,’ said Tracey. ‘You’d think he’d go for someone a bit younger?’

  Her comments suggested a touch of jealousy so I ignored them and the ensuing frostiness they brought to our quarters. While I felt like telling her men usually preferred something with a bit of mystery rather than a ‘what you see is what you get’ approach, I knew we needed to work together, firstly to stay sane while in captivity, and secondly to get out alive. Not only that, she was only nine years younger than me so it wouldn’t be long before the diamond birthday would hit her like a jack out of its box.

  ‘Perhaps I remind him of his mother,’ I said, laughing to myself that he was probably the child of a massive great African woman with a shelf for a bottom and big white tombstone teeth.

  ‘Yeah, that could be it,’ said Tracey, as she stuck her earring into David’s eye.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  If Tom, Darius and Bob had all been contacted by this gang, how come they found no one to connect with Tracey, not even her so-called fiancé who had disappeared off the face of the earth, I wondered?

  I questioned if he really did exist and what her background was. There are few people who have so little contact with their relatives they can’t be found in emergencies.

  ‘So how did you meet him?’ I asked one morning, during a moment when I thought our various predictions of our destiny could spiral into madness. I was fairly confident Darius would find us soon but Tracey’s view was that Africans are cannibals and our captors were just waiting for a few onions and a big enough pot to make us into stew.

  Making conversation could be hard work, bearing in mind the limitations of my fellow prisoner’s interests, which were restricted to a few subjects; mainly clubbing, the size of her widescreen plasma television and how many men she’d been on a date with who she later found out were married. I would surprise myself at the topics I could drag up to discuss with someone who probably had no idea about how to make a béchamel sauce.

  ‘On the internet,’ sniffed Tracey. ‘PlentyOfFish.’

  I was confused. All we’d eaten since our arrival had been boiled eggs of varying degrees of hardness and some fruit.

  ‘We haven’t had any fish,’ I said.

  Tracey screeched with laughter, forgetting the gap from the loss of her false tooth.

  ‘No, silly. It’s the name of a dating site. It’s like, more fish in the sea. PlentyOfFish,’ she giggled in her throaty fashion. ‘We got on really well from the first message. He likes loads I like. Even techno and trance, and he thinks I’m well fit.’

  I held back the immediate comments I had about grammar and decided to avoid any questions about the meaning of ‘techno and trance’. I suspected they were both something to do with drugs.

  ‘I met Bob online,’ I threw into the conversation by way of association. I didn’t want to feel totally left out in terms of my willingness to grasp some concepts of the modern world.

  I desperately wanted to talk to someone about Darius. He filled my waking moments, and some of my sleeping ones, and my awakened sexuality was as strung out as a politician’s speech.

  ‘Hey, go Cynthia, high five!’ said Tracey, holding her right hand up in the air. I ignored the gesture, mainly because I didn’t really know what to do and suspected the whole process was a bit vulgar.

  Tracey let her hand drop. ‘You’re supposed to hit my hand with yours. High five, geddit?’

  I didn’t get it and so continued with the interrogation. Her story was fascinating in the same way as watching a car crash. You just can’t help wanting to know more – and whether or not anyone dies.

&nb
sp; ‘So when did he ask you to marry him?’

  Tracey looked up towards me and, as her face became partially shadowed by the light from the unshaded bulb hanging from the ceiling, I could see dark circles under her eyes and a sagginess in her cheeks only a lifetime of nutritional deprivation can produce.

  ‘Three weeks ago. He told me to come here as he has family business, and then we’ll get married at home,’ she replied.

  She told me she’d had a daughter when she was eighteen, but rarely saw her as she’d married some ‘posh git’ as Tracey called him. I gathered the son-in-law didn’t approve of her, so she was banned from visiting the house. Tracey had tried to keep in contact but her daughter got busier and Tracey found repeated rejection too hard. She didn’t express it like that, but I understood what she was saying; sometimes it’s easier to take yourself away from the firing line, particularly with families.

  Tracey went on: ‘That’s why he needed the dosh. So he can sort out stuff here and then come back with me for the wedding. He can’t just walk out on his family.’

  I was sympathetic to Tracey’s feelings, considering how I’d reacted upon hearing of Darius’s predicament.

  The key turned in the padlock and I assumed it was going to be Gowon, but instead Chike walked in, carrying a small plastic bag.

  ‘Morning, my ladies,’ he said, grinning widely. ‘I have a very important question for you.’

  He spun around and then sat down on the one and only chair, while Tracey and I remained sitting on the mattress. Chike rummaged about in the bag and pulled out a mesh canvas, some woollen yarns and a selection of needles.

  ‘How am I supposed to finish this?’ he shouted, throwing everything on the floor.

  He held his head in his hands and started to cry, which I found most disturbing. I went over to the pile of material and sorted through it. There were two needlepoint patterns. One called “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep” and the other ‘Groovy Frog’. They’d both been partially completed.

  ‘I think you need some black yarn,’ I said to him, not quite sure how to attend to the requirements of a frustrated needle-pointer.