Hostage Three

by Nick Lake

  I was feeling so angry with him, but there was something about the way he said this, about his grey eyes in the morning light, and even though I wanted to tell him what to do with himself and his promises, I didn’t. I just nodded instead. I trusted him.

  I was an idiot. Not because I shouldn’t have trusted him. Not because of that at all. But because of what happened afterwards.

  If I hadn’t nodded, if I’d sworn at him, if I’d dropped the violin in the ocean and walked away without looking back, maybe things would have been different.

  Maybe nobody would have had to die.

  My dad was snoring, the stepmother curled up on his shoulder. They were holding hands, which was disgusting. It was bad enough having the stepmother around all the time, like in our house in London, but it was another thing having her, my mom’s usurper, in the same room cuddled up with my dad at night.

  Tony was on the sofa, breathing heavily.

  I got up from the armchair I was sitting on, moving gingerly. I took one step, then held my breath, looked around.

  Dad snored on.

  The room was dark as there was only one lamp on, in the corner, where Felipe had been reading a magazine. He was sleeping now, too. I crept towards the door, avoiding the obstacles on the floor – the discarded clothes, Damian stretched out on some sofa cushions, face down. I felt clumsy, but my bare feet were silent over the plush carpet.

  It felt like a mile, the length of the cinema room, when really it was probably only twenty steps. I kept turning around, convinced I’d heard my dad sitting up. If he did, I’d say I was going to the toilet.

  I put my hand on the silver doorknob and turned it. There was a barely audible squeak, and I whipped my head round again.

  No one moved.

  I pulled the door ever so slowly.

  Creak.

  Shit. I froze, holding the door still. I listened. My dad had stopped snoring. I watched the shape of him in the gloom. Then, a sort of ratcheting sound, and the snoring started again. I felt breath rush back into my lungs, sudden, and hard as an attack.

  Gritting my teeth, I opened the door a little further, then twisted myself through it, remembering to hold it as it closed to stop it slamming.

  When I got out on the deck, the stars were out, of course. It was like there were never any clouds, never any rain. How the hell did anything grow here? I could understand why Farouz said that all Somali stories were about hunger. Even the squirrel and the lion – because the lion ate the squirrel, didn’t it?

  I sat down on a sunlounger. I’d dressed in the dark, but I had on an All Saints top I loved and a vintage 50s skirt I got on Brick Lane. Foolish of me to dress up, I know, and weird when I was still so angry, but go figure.

  I didn’t have long to wait for Farouz to come out. I knew the sound of his footsteps by then, the particular pace of his walk. I was seriously hoping that no one was going to wake up to go to the loo or something, and realise I was gone. I wasn’t worried about the pirates. Most of the guards, Ahmed and Farouz excepted, were usually high on khat, or drunk, or wired from drinking that terrible coffee and sugar mixture they seemed addicted to.

  So I was on my own, and then Farouz appeared, his hello when he saw me low and slow, so as not to alert anyone, and I wasn’t on my own any more.

  Farouz sat down on the sunlounger next to mine. His face was wreathed in smoke, as usual. He was toying with his gun. He started to say something, stopped, started again.

  — I . . . I have told Ahmed that I will take the same share as before, he said eventually.

  — What? I said, shocked. Why?

  — For you.

  I looked at him. I could feel something inside me, some hardness, softening, like stale bread in water.

  — Won’t Ahmed wonder why? I asked.

  — Perhaps. Farouz made an equivocal gesture with his hand. He just knows I don’t want any extra money. Ahmed is . . . he is not a bad man. He has children, a wife.

  — I know, I said.

  — Also . . . Farouz said hesitantly. I think Ahmed suspects that I like you.

  A silence.

  — You like me?

  I couldn’t be sure, but I think he blushed.

  — Maybe, he said. And you?

  — I don’t know. There’s someone I like. He’s good-looking. Sweet. But there’s a problem, you see.

  — Oh?

  — Yes. He’s a pirate.

  Farouz edged on to my sunlounger.

  — Coast guard, he said.

  — And that’s another problem, I said with a laugh. There’s this language barrier. He doesn’t speak very good English, so –

  He poked me, gently, on the arm.

  — Hey!

  Then he said something in Somali that sounded like a curse.

  — I forgot, he said. I got you a present, for your birthday. I was going to give it to you before, in your cabin, but . . . Well, I was distracted.

  I thought of that kiss: yes, he had been distracted. I had been, too.

  — Anyway, he said. Here. He reached into his pocket and placed something in my hand. It was cool and compact, smooth.

  I looked down at it, a very simple wooden box, about the size of a jewellery box. For a moment I thought, no, he couldn’t have, could he? I mean, he’s a –

  And then I thought, stupid Amy. He could have stolen some earrings from anywhere. A ring.

  So my veins were running a bit cold when I opened it. I was all prepared to be polite, but I already felt offended, like, did he really think some damn stolen jewellery was going to make me happy?

  But it wasn’t jewellery.

  I didn’t see inside the box properly at first, just had an impression of something heaped and multiple and glinting.

  Then –

  — Sand, I said.

  He smiled.

  — From Somalia, he said. I got it when I went for the eggs, from the beach. So that you have some of my country to carry with you, even if you never go yourself. Even when –

  I held up a hand to stop him saying it, to stop him talking about when we would be saying goodbye.

  I held the glittering sand in its box in my palm, then closed the lid and squeezed my hand tight around it.

  — Thank you, I said.

  He touched my hand with the box inside it.

  — You are welcome, he said.

  I loosened my fingers and held his hand, too, stopped him withdrawing it.

  — It’s cold, I said.

  — It is, he replied.

  We were very close together now. I could feel the heat from his body.

  On his face, the bruises had barely faded. And the hard muscles of his arms were just there, in front of me. Muscles that were made for hitting people, for . . .

  No.

  I closed my eyes. Dad was wrong and the stepmother was wrong: I wasn’t self-destructive, and I didn’t have a death wish. I knew it most fiercely in that moment – not because I wasn’t scared, but because I was excited. I wanted to live. I wanted to experience everything.

  — Are you OK? said Farouz.

  — Yes, I said.

  I put a hand on the back of his neck, felt the shifting bulk of his muscle. It was like it rose to meet my hand, fitting itself there, in the curve of my palm, the way my violin used to sit perfectly in the compass of my touch.

  He smelled of smoke. He smelled of the sea. He smelled of sand.

  My heart was a foreign creature that had got into my body, fallen asleep for years and now was awake and leaping.

  — Kiss me, I said.

  And he did.

  I think Farouz would have liked to go further, but I wasn’t ready for it, and he respected that. I appreciated that. Some people would probably say it was Stockhausen syndrome, or whatever it’s called, where people fall in love with their captors, but really he was very gentle.

  I hadn’t done much of this kind of stuff before. I mean, I know: the piercings, and the smoking and the clubbing, right? So you
might think, well . . . But you would be wrong.

  I’d only ever kissed one boy, Travis, by the time I left New York. He tasted of onion bagel, and his glasses caught in my hair, so we had to disentangle him afterwards. Since then, nothing. I think the English boys were scared of me, or they hated me, I don’t know.

  Most of the time we didn’t even kiss, me and Farouz. We just snuggled up, held each other’s hands. If someone else was telling me this I’d want to puke, but there you go. We’re all hypocrites.

  So, we sat there, wrapped around each other. It was like we were in our own little world inside the real world, like one Russian doll inside another, everything just warmth and the stars, and the sound of the sea lapping at the hull of the yacht.

  — Our country was made this way, said Farouz. Our language.

  His fingers were interlaced with mine, brown and white.

  — I’m sorry?

  — An Arab man and a Somali woman, a long time ago, he said. Pale and dark, only the other way around. The man was called Darod, which means stranger in Somali, so I guess that wasn’t his real name. The woman was Dombiro. The man, he was thrown from a ship and he swam to the beach, near here.

  — Why was he thrown from a ship?

  — He was the youngest prince, and had many older brothers. He came from Al-Hejaz, from Arabia. When his father died, the other princes told him he would be exiled to stop him from competing for the throne. And that is what they planned, but instead the captain of the ship threw him overboard, and took his belongings and his money. At first, Darod was very afraid. This land he found himself in was hot, hotter than Arabia. And there were none of the trees and the birds he was used to. Only bushes and dust. He could find no shelter from the burning sun, and feared that he would die. He knew that to drink seawater could drive him mad. Farouz pointed to the land. Imagine washing up on that beach alone, he said.

  I looked at Somalia, an even blacker outline in the darkness.

  — Scary, I said.

  — Yes. But it was all right, because when he crawled up the beach and into Somalia, Dombiro found him. She was a beautiful woman of the Dir clan, tall and with long, loose limbs, large dark eyes, long hair like the night, falling around her face. She was the chieftain’s daughter, as he was a prince. He was Arab and she was African; they spoke no words in common. But when their eyes met, something happened, some music in the air. She sheltered him in an oasis, brought him water to drink and figs to eat, which were beirda in her language, and tinata in his.

  — And they fell in love?

  — And they fell in love. And he taught her about Mohammed, while she taught him how to live on the arid land and raise cattle there. She taught him to find water for her goats, which she was tending. He taught her writing, culture, religion. She taught him how to dig a well, how to find berries safe to eat, how to recognise the tracks of a hyena, where to cut a goat’s throat – not to kill it, but to get a little blood for mixing with milk for strength.

  — Yuck, I said.

  — You would not say that if you were starving. I told you –

  — All your stories are stories of hunger. I know. I rolled my eyes at him.

  — You are a good student, he said condescendingly. Like Darod.

  — I’m Darod, in this story? I should be Dombiro, the beautiful girl.

  — No. You are the pale stranger who knows nothing about surviving in our land.

  — OK, yes. Fair enough.

  — At first, Farouz went on, Dombiro’s family were not pleased to see Darod when she finally showed him to them, after keeping him in the oasis for many months. But eventually they welcomed him, as is the Somali way. He never returned to Al-Hejaz. And their descendants are the people of Puntland, to this very day.

  — That’s lovely, I said.

  I liked that idea – that they had come from different cultures, but fallen in love all the same.

  — Yes, he said. It is probably not true. But it is nice.

  — A lot of things are like that, I said.

  — Yes, he replied.

  Farouz fell silent then, and I did, too.

  I looked up at the stars sparkling above us. I remembered Mom talking about black holes, and supernovas, and how there were a hundred billion stars in our galaxy and a hundred billion galaxies, and how that should have made her feel small, but it didn’t – it made everything seem more meaningful.

  I didn’t know what she meant then, but now I did.

  I also remembered, as I lay there in Farouz’s hard arms, Mom telling me about the music of the spheres. It’s an old idea from philosophy. It was Pythagoras who came up with it first. He knew that there was a mathematics behind music. Take an octave: every time you go up an octave, all you’re really doing is doubling the frequency of the note. Middle C is 261 hertz, or 261 vibrations a second. The next C up on the keyboard, or fretboard or whatever, is 522 hertz. Even chords are in harmony; they go up in mathematical steps. If you want a major chord, the ratio of the frequencies is 4:5:6.

  But Pythagoras thought it didn’t stop with music. He saw the planets, spinning around in their orbits, and he noticed what he thought were some regularities in their distance. He decided that the spaces between the planets in the solar system must be like notes in a chord, must be following some kind of grand harmony. That planets must make notes by spinning, and together a symphony; that if you could stand in the right place, if your ear was big enough, you would hear their music.

  Oh, Mom, I thought, remembering how she told me this on a cold November evening on the loneliest beach in North America, looking up at the stars. How she got excited and made lots of gestures to try to explain what she was talking about, spreading her hands for the distance between the stars, dancing around to show their spinning. How she babbled as she tried to convey how exciting it was, even if it was wrong, the idea that the stars and music were somehow the same.

  I miss you so much, I thought.

  Suddenly, lying there with Farouz, I didn’t mind so much that Mom said stardust like that in her note to me. Now it was OK. I was thinking about what she said, about all things being linked, about us all being stardust, and I wasn’t angry about it like I was before. I was thinking about the music of the spheres, too. Because I loved that idea, I really did. And I knew why she loved it.

  Because things might be meant to happen.

  Because an order might exist, under the chaos.

  Because the universe might be playing a tune.

  This is what I was thinking, when there came the sound of footsteps leading up to the door on to the deck.

  Someone was coming out.

  And I was in Farouz’s arms.

  Heart racing, I tried to move away – but not quick enough, as Mohammed opened the door and stepped outside.

  For a moment, he stayed completely still, looking at us, then a smirk began to spread across his face. Very slowly, very deliberately, he closed the door behind him.

  — Ah. Hostage Three is . . . whore, he said.

  Farouz jumped to his feet, but Mohammed pushed him back down. He said something to him in their language, something contemptuous.

  Oh god, this is worse than a fine, I thought. This isn’t just a thousand dollars.

  I started to run towards the door.

  Mohammed grabbed my top and it tore, so he grabbed my arm instead and spun me back towards him, yanking the breath from me. He clasped my hand in his. His other hand held his AK-47; I could feel the coldness of the metal against my back. He shook his head: no. I didn’t try to run again. His hand moved up my arm. Then his fingers splayed and he stroked my skin. It seemed to contract at his touch, shrivelling away from him – the sensation of him brushing against me was like sloe berries in the mouth.

  He barked something at Farouz.

  Farouz shook his head.

  Mohammed shouted and his spittle landed on my face.

  A hardness came over Farouz’s expression.

  — He says since you hav
e already been touched by a coast guard, it will do no harm for another to touch you, said Farouz in a blank voice.

  — No, I said.

  Mohammed laughed.

  — You not die, he said. He tapped his head. I not idiot. We want money.

  — Farouz! I said. Farouz, please . . .

  — I am sorry, said Farouz. I am sorry. His voice was hollow, scooped out, like an eaten avocado.

  — Yes. Good. Now, said Mohammed, with his sour voice, his black-stained khat-teeth, his fat revolting tongue. Now, quiet.

  He was close to me, his breath a physical thing, leaping out from his mouth.

  The yacht tilted on some awful secret axis that I had never known was there. I found myself praying, silently, even though I had not prayed for years and years, and I wasn’t even sure how any more.

  Mohammed undid his belt buckle. He unbuttoned my All Saints top.

  He put his gun down.

  He pushed me down,

  down,

  down,

  on to the sunlounger.

  I’ve told you about the sound when a gun goes off next to you. But I can’t describe the feeling of it – the feeling of a man looming over you one moment, scarred face lowering down, unstoppable, and then half his face is gone, blown away in bloody rags, and his body falls on to you, meaty, heavy, and his blood is hot on your face, and somewhere behind all that, like lightning becoming thunder, a crack loud enough to be the world breaking.

  Energy, violence, heat, and, to begin with, no sound at all.

  It’s a bit like a heavy blankness, a bit like this:

  (

  ).

  Followed by a boom that shakes your inner ears – only you have to imagine that all of it is red, blood-red, and weighs a hundred kilos.

  Then I screamed.

  There was sticky stuff in my hair, a smell of burning, of cordite, I guess, and my head felt like it had been inside a big bell when someone struck it. I scrabbled at Mohammed’s leaden corpse, trying to get it off me, still screaming for all I knew, for all I could hear. My leg was trapped – oh god, my leg was trapped – but then it popped out, and I kind of half-fell, half-crawled off the sunlounger on to the deck. I realised I could taste blood in my mouth, metallic, and I thought for a moment I had bitten my tongue, before it hit me that this was Mohammed’s blood, his blood, in my mouth.