Matt has always had a positive attitude, but this new Matt is outstanding. I am wondering how long New Matt will stay. Will this bubble pop and splatter all over the place, leaving me to clean up the mess? To my surprise New Matt seems to be here for the long haul.
November is exhausting. I am catering every weekend, working from our home. The kids are in the way, and I yell at them for being in their own kitchen. I am up to my eyeballs in bridezilla bullshit.
One Saturday night I climb into bed after getting home late from a wedding, and think how wonderful it is to experience the calmness of a sleeping house. I have another big function the next day so I welcome sleep. I am awoken by Matt – it feels like I have only been asleep for five minutes.
‘Kel, Kel, look at this!’
I look up to see Matt standing in the doorway, blocking the diffused light coming from Stirling’s room down the hallway. Matt is naked and I can see the silhouette of his body and chest hair.
‘Look! Look at this!’ He starts moving his arms up and down. If he was lying in the snow, he would be making snow angels; giant, hairy naked snow angels.
Now I sit up in surprise. Matt hasn’t been able to lift his arm since being diagnosed with Parsonage—Turner syndrome in July, just before Nige was kidnapped. PTS is an extremely rare nerve condition that stops the use of the shoulder, tricep and bicep muscles. Matt usually can’t lift his arm more than 10 centimetres away from his body. He has trouble dressing himself, he can’t drive and he can’t use a knife or fork. But now he is extending his arm up to just above his shoulder. I am gobsmacked. It’s 4 a.m. but Matt doesn’t come back to bed – he’s off to see if he can lift something heavy.
It’s amazing what a positive attitude can do.
Nicky
Moore Park
Monday, 3 November
I’m escaping for a few days. At the start of the year I said I’d go on school camp with the Grade 7s, and I kind of expected this all to be over by the time it came round. There is no way I’m not going – it’s Jacinta’s year group and they are an awesome tight-knit bunch of kids. It will be sad when they head off to different schools next year and start developing rebellious streaks.
Camp is a jam-packed celebration of finishing primary school: four days of theme parks, swimming, night tours, ice-skating, rollerskating, as well as a trip down to Brisbane and back. They will be shattered by the end of it – I am from just looking at the itinerary.
The evening before I head off I get a call from Adan.
‘Nigel is sick, can’t get awake, lots of sleep,’ he tells me.
‘Well, Adan, there is a care package waiting for you. Reece has sent you a package and it’s going to Mogadishu. If Nige is sick, it’s your responsibility to get the medicine to him. You assured both Lorinda and me that you were looking after them.’
I’m being a bit pushy and the conversation could go either way. But Adan’s not aggressive with me, instead he deflects.
‘The group is angry and need money for security.’
When I ask if he has seen Nigel and Amanda recently, Adan tells me that he ‘is a long way from them now’. After the call I add a new point to my strategy notes: ‘How can you protect them for me if you are not with them?’ It gets written in my notebook and jotted down on the sheets of butcher’s paper that cover the walls. Wallpaper most odd.
AJ has been training up as NOK with me and doing mock calls as well. She’ll be on duty while I’m away.
The first day of school camp packs a lot in. We board the bus at 6 a.m. and finish with a night tour of Saint Helena, the old penal colony just offshore from Brisbane. We are back at camp and in bed by midnight. Day two is just as crazy. We’ve been at Dreamworld all day, keeping tabs on thirty-odd kids. Some try to drag me onto rides to see if they can make me spew. They know I get hopelessly carsick so it becomes a real battle of wills. I am not going on the Claw; I plan on keeping my dignity as well as my lunch. It’s madness to think managing this lot is preferable to dealing with Adan. I’m having so much fun.
We all spill into Subway for dinner, and then head off to the ice-skating rink. I haven’t been ice-skating since I was eighteen when a boyfriend down in Sydney took me – I got completely saturated and spent the whole time on my arse. In spite of that, I was up for a laugh and wanted to try it again, fully expecting to be even worse now as I’m not as flexible at forty-ish. AJ calls me just as I’m about to don my shoes, and instead of skating, I spend the whole session curled up in the bleachers, freezing, simultaneously trying to watch the kids and talk over the loud disco music that accompanies the ice games.
Nairobi has contacted Canberra, who passed the message on to the negs. Our care parcel has gone into Mogadishu. It’s waiting for Adan to pick up and take to the kidnappers. I am delirious with excitement. Maybe the airport has security cameras, or there is a tracking device in the box.
When I finally get off the phone, I’m walking on air. It’s ridiculous to get so pumped about a parcel, but I’m overwhelmed by the idea that Nige will be getting our letters and some toothpaste. Books and medicine. This shits all over the letters from home on Survivor.
Nigel
The Light House
November
Amanda has two windows with metal shutters in her room. The one that faces west, looking out into the next-door neighbour’s yard with the tin shack, has been permanently closed by the boys. They’re obviously concerned she will try to communicate with someone. The other window faces the same wall as mine.
Our windows are only metres apart and it isn’t long before we realise how good the acoustics are. As our roof crosses over with next door’s and the two houses are close together, the noise gets trapped and this makes it easy for us to hear any conversations taking place in the other’s room.
We start whispering to each other out our windows, and the new rule about keeping our doors closed works to our advantage. I have become attuned to the sound of bare feet coming down the hallway and to the sight of shadows at the bottom of the doorway, which give me enough warning to stop the conversation. My Qur’an is always in my hand, a prop for if someone walks in unexpectedly.
We knock on the wall near the window to indicate that we want to talk. At the start we’d spend no longer than a minute or two but as time goes on we get bolder and conversations last up to ten minutes. Assam comes in each night to close the windows, and then we knock to each other.
My work on Assam pays off. He comes into my room looking sneaky but pleased, and unrolls the cuff of his jeans to reveal a pen. He’s bought it from the market and tells me I should keep it hidden – he didn’t ask Skids’ permission. It isn’t an ordinary pen; it’s a big four-colour one like I had in primary school with red, black, blue and green ink. Jackpot!
Assam gets straight down to business, teaching me the basics in Somali: please, thank you, can I have water, can I go to the toilet/shower, can I wash clothes, do you speak English, can I talk with the Captain. This gets me goodwill among the boys, the non-English speakers particularly, and they all laugh at me as I struggle to pronounce each word.
Around this time I get a disturbing message from Amanda: ‘I am getting unwanted visitors’. I immediately think of Donkey, the evil little bastard. He’s the one who seems to love making her life hell. I talk with Amanda about it via our windows. I don’t ask her to state exactly what is happening, part of me doesn’t want to know, but she confirms that the culprit is in fact Donkey.
We devise a plan. If I hear anyone in her room, I will bang on my door to attract the attention of the other boys. The problem is that Donkey manages to slip in and out without a sound. I’m sure he must be gagging Amanda as I don’t hear so much as a peep. At one point I catch him leaving her room, scurrying down the hallway like a cockroach. I feel helpless and guilty for not being able to prevent what’s happening.
Amanda tells Ahmed about the situation on his next visit, and begs him to remove Donkey from the house. But perversely he say
s she needs four witnesses before he can do anything. She says the same thing to Donald when he next comes, and his response is shocking. He asks Amanda if she enticed Donkey, and if she liked it. These people are complete psychopaths.
I have no idea what I can do to stop it. Out of pure frustration I scrub the bathroom as it’s the only place Amanda has privacy. I now stand guard when she showers as I’ve caught Assam lying on the floor, ogling Amanda through the curtain of our bathroom.
With the bathroom spotless, it becomes apparent we have a little friend: there are fresh rat droppings evident each morning. One evening I hear Amanda knocking for the bathroom, followed by her shrill scream. I’m dying to race out to make sure she is okay but think better of it as I hear a number of the boys run down the hallway.
The following morning she explains what happened. The rat had startled her by running over her foot. Her scream had brought Donkey and Skids, who put a gun to her head. She was told to shut up, that they will kill her if it happens again. The only thing in my power is to check the toilet each morning and night, making sure the rat is nowhere in sight before telling Amanda it is safe for her to go.
We take big risks just to see each other. When Amanda goes to the bathroom, she knocks on the wall to indicate she’s on her way back to her room. I creep to my door, opening it quickly so that it doesn’t squeak. Then we hold hands and whisper to stay positive, that everything is okay. The pain is there to see on her face. She is also having a lot of trouble with her eyes. They’ve become infected because she has to clean her contacts in filthy water. Without her contacts, she has difficulty seeing anything. The boys don’t give a shit about her health and have ignored her repeated requests for contact-cleaning solution. She’s got fungus growths around her nose and top lip. I can feel her embarrassment as she tries to hide them.
Becoming Muslim not only means having to pray five times a day and read the Qur’an. I have to greet other Muslims in the correct Arabic manner, eat and drink with my right hand and wipe my arse with my left. I’m told to cut my hair, shave my moustache and grow a beard. The kinkier side of the religion is that I’m forced to pluck my underarm hair and cut my pubic hair; this is enforced by the younger guys. I’m no longer even able to choose what my own pubes look like.
The one thing I can’t tolerate is being clicked at. Whenever I knock to go to the toilet, rather than walking down the corridor the boys now just lean across from their spot near the front door and click their fingers repeatedly. How lazy is that? At times for no reason they shout, ‘Wait!’, then after a few minutes rapidly click their fingers, signalling for me to go – they love riding their little power trip.
We aren’t allowed to go to the toilet after they’ve locked the front doors so at night I have to piss into a water bottle. It’s humiliating. I flout the rules during the day, sneaking back and forth to the bathroom, and giving them the two-fingered salute behind their backs. Jamal catches me in the toilet a few times but I explain that I was desperate and couldn’t wait. He wags his finger, but his big smile always tells me he is going to let it slide.
Nicky
Moore Park
November
The parcel has still not been picked up. Reece spoke to Adan, who was seriously pissed off. Adan says he went to pick up the package on the fifth but the courier said he didn’t have the correct documentation. Apparently at Mogadishu airport you need more that just a name to pick up a parcel. Go figure. Reece has scanned the list of documents required and emailed it to Adan. Nairobi is not making this easy for Adan; it’s no wonder he is suspicious of them.
When Reece next speaks to Adan, on the fourteenth, the parcel has still not been picked up. Reece asks about Abdi, to whom we’ve also sent a care package. We have asked the AFP on a number of occasions who is paying ransom for him. His wife and father in Somalia have been very vocal about his incarceration, as well as about Nigel and Amanda’s. The response has so far been that this is not our problem or responsibility. Our focus needs to be on Nigel and Amanda; Abdi’s family will have to look after their own. Dad in particular is dissatisfied with this. It creates conflicting emotions for all of us, considering the fatality rate of Somali journos in these circumstances is high.
Reece asks Adan when he will next see Nigel and Amanda, and Adan’s reply is that he ‘is not close to them; they are in a nomadic village far from the city’.
On the twentieth we get confirmation that the parcel has left the airport. They can’t confirm who picked it up. When Adan rings back on the twenty-eighth, he says his children got the toys but he doesn’t mention if he passed on the medicine or our letters. We just have to hope that, if Nige and Amanda really are sick, the kidnappers will give them the medicine – surely drugs would be expensive. I think I’m correct in guessing there are no multinational pharmaceutical companies churning out penicillin in the Dish. Then again, who knows? Their economy is so screwed up: guns are as cheap as chips and they are all imported.
When I get back from the camp, AJ heads down to Brisbane for a bit of a break. The girlfriend and the mother – it’s very much Meet the Fockers territory. By the time she gets back, she has decided it’s time for her to go. My kids love her, as do I, and we are all sad to see her leave. But it’s an act of self-preservation, and I understand that. Like the rest of us, she must have lingering doubts about Nigel meeting up with Amanda; they do, after all, have a history. AJ’s relationship with Nigel is relatively new and it just can’t sustain his protracted absence. She says she needs to cut ties with us too. My response is to cling together and not break away; it’s hard to realise that other people work differently. She’s decided she has to move forward and I know it’s the right decision for her to make.
Nigel
The Light House
Thursday, 20 November
We get a visit from Donald. As usual, he spends time with Amanda before coming to see me. He finally walks in with a large plastic bag in each hand. After greeting me, he says they have received a care package from our families.
He hands over toiletries, medicine, a crossword and Sudoku puzzle book, three books (Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns, and Hemingway’s The Green Hills of Africa and The Snows of Kilimanjaro), a Newsweek magazine, an eraser, sharpener, pencils and pens and two notebooks, a box of digestive biscuits and a five-pack of underpants, one pair of which has already been removed. All of these things might have been touched by someone in my family. I can’t control myself and start to cry. Donald chides me for being upset, and I dearly want to tell him where to go. I hold my tongue and put my emotions in check.
I sit on my mattress and spread out everything I’ve received. I have never felt so unhappy to receive gifts. The sheer quantity scares me – by the looks of it we are going to be here for a long time. But more than that, it’s a sign they have begun negotiating directly with our families – none of this makes sense otherwise. This is our families’ reward for doing something the gang wanted them to do.
After we hear Donald leaving the house, Amanda and I talk. Her care package is the same except she now has a pair of prescription glasses – a godsend – Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom in two parts, a book on stress release and some sanitary products.
As the day goes on, we begin questioning whether all of this stuff has in fact come from our families. Amanda’s drugs are from a Nairobi pharmacy, so maybe the embassies in Kenya had a hand in it. It’s a relief to think our governments are still somehow involved and I’m praying they are helping with the negotiations.
My days of obsessively reading the Qur’an come to a halt now I’ve got better offers. Whereas time had been moving at a glacial pace, the puzzles and books make the hours and days whiz by. I know it’s a fool’s paradise but I’m enjoying not thinking about the real state of things while it lasts. Amanda is ploughing through her books, reading the first part of Mandela’s story in two days.
We begin swapping books, secretly leaving them for each other in the bat
hroom, and being careful to conceal them in our rooms. We’re sure that the boys know exactly what we have each received.
Nicky
Moore Park
November
November, it seems, is kidnap month in Somalia.
We become quite blasé about stories of piracy in Somalia. I’m vaguely interested in the price the boats are released for, but in these cases the crew are incidental; it’s all about the cargo. It’s only the land-based kidnappings in Somalia where the people are the commodity.
Early on 6 November aid workers with the NGO Action Against Hunger are taken from Dhusa Mareb, 500 kilometres north of Mogadishu. I discover that one of the Kenyan pilots has dual citizenship with Australia. The internet really is an amazing tool. James doesn’t appear to be too thrilled that I’ve found this out.
I suspect that the NGO will have insurance and they will be using a kidnap and ransom company to get them released. K&R companies are risk-management organisations, underwritten by insurance companies, which negotiate the payment of ransoms and the subsequent release of the captives, among other things. I guess the issue for the NGO is that paying a ransom sets a precedent. They are an aid organisation that feeds some of the world’s poorest refugees in some truly inhospitable places. If they don’t go into a country because they could be kidnapped, who will? I understand their dilemma. We didn’t stop discussing the precedent situation for the whole first week: if we pay a ransom, it sets a precedent for every other Australian who gets kidnapped. But what is the price of a life? If money is what it takes to get Nige home, then it’s very easy for me to step off the soapbox.
The Price of Life Page 13