A Long Walk Home: One Woman's Story of Kidnap, Hostage, Loss - and Survival (12 page)

The next morning the Navigator brought me the news that I would receive another phone call later in the day. I was cheered. It might mean progress, perhaps a breakthrough in ‘negotiations’ –
at the very least a chance for me to address some things left undone during the previous day’s call. That afternoon could not come quickly enough for me. Finally the Navigator came in bearing the Leader’s red phone like a totem. Once again the room filled with eager pirates, some of whom hunkered down on the floor, while others kicked their heels. The Navigator, the Leader and Marvin perched themselves on the edge of my bed, as if affirming their seniority. But all of them were grinning and giving me the thumbs-up sign, seemingly as eager in their own ways as I was for news about how this piece of business was proceeding.

With the phone to my ear I heard the Negotiator: ‘OK, I put through. You have three minutes …’ What followed was another rigmarole of lost connections and the line going dead. But I stayed patient, sure it would happen, determined to use my time well.

‘Hello, hello, hello?’

‘Yes, Mum, it’s me.’

‘Hi, Ollie darling, how are you?’

‘Mum, we’ve only got three minutes. But, listen, we’re still working on getting the money.’

‘And where’s Dad, Ollie? How is he? How’s he coping with this?’

‘Mum, there’s something I have to tell you. Dad didn’t survive his injuries …’

In my head, in my heart, it was as if a clock had stopped.

‘Injuries? What do you mean, injuries?’

‘He was trying to protect you, Mum. He was brave to the very last minute …’

No. It just wasn’t possible. Ollie simply couldn’t mean what he seemed to be meaning.

‘Ollie, are you telling me Dad is
dead
? Is that what you mean?’

I was staring, stricken, across the room. The sight I saw clearest was the Navigator’s face – and the effect of the word ‘dead’ upon him had been immediate. His grin vanished.

‘I’m so sorry, Mum …’

The Navigator muttered something to Marvin, but loud enough for the rest of the room to hear. Sharp intakes of breath, mouths opening, eyebrows raised – startled faces looking from one to another then back at me. Ollie’s voice filled my head.

‘We’ve just got to remember all the good times we had with him …’

Even as my whole being seemed to reel away, in horror, I was wondering who had counselled my beloved son, advised him to use these very considered words, so grave and wise and grown up, to deliver to me the worst news in the world.

‘We’re still working on getting you home, Mum. I’ve met with the family. They all send their love …’

I didn’t know what I was saying any more, or what I could say. Some of the pirates, meanwhile, were getting up and making their way out of the room.

‘I love you, Mum. I need you – I need you to get through this, to stay strong. It’s just a matter of time, Mum. We’ll get you home …’

The instant I heard ‘home’ the line went dead, and the Negotiator’s voice returned.

‘That’s it, no more.’

‘Did you hear that?’ I said to him, trying to force my voice out through the dreadful fog in my head.

‘Hear what?’

‘My husband is
dead
. You killed my husband.’

‘Who tell you your husband dead?’

‘You were listening, weren’t you? You heard my son. My husband’s dead. And you have got to get me on a plane out of here, tomorrow, because I need to be with my son. You’ve got to fly me home tomorrow.’ I was frantic now, desperate. I could hear the pleading in my voice. ‘You
must
, you have
got
to do this – I’ve got to get back to see my son.’

‘We will check that out tomorrow, and we will start negotiations.’

‘I beg you …’

‘We check it tomorrow. No decision.’

The ground had gone beneath me, and I had fallen, so hard I couldn’t bear to look at the injury. I would give anything to reverse the spool of time, or prove that I’d been told another lie. But it was Ollie who had told me: he would only ever tell me the truth.

And in this squalid room I had barely space to move or breathe for the presence of the strange, unfeeling, mercenary creatures who had wreaked this catastrophe on us. Had they really known no more than I had until now, about how my and my family’s lives had been ruined?

I looked around the room and I jabbed a finger from one face to the next.

‘You, and you, and you – all of you – you killed my husband. My husband is
dead
because of all of
you
.’

Whether they were shamed, or embarrassed, or had simply lost interest, the stragglers too now started to file out of the room. None of them had taken part in my abduction. But I was staring hardest of all at the Navigator, and Marvin, and the Leader, still sitting on the corner of the bed. The Leader – the last man to see David alive – looked back impassive. He was the man David had struggled with. It had to be him. Money wasn’t strong enough. It was him.

‘You – you’re responsible. Aren’t you? You killed my husband, didn’t you?’

I looked at him hard and he looked back. It was a stand-off. But I would not let him stare me out. Finally he got to his feet and sauntered out.

In the aftermath there were comings and goings to which I barely paid attention, but the next thing I knew was that Marvin and the Navigator were standing over me, now joined by Money, who grinned inanely.

‘Go, leave me alone,’ I muttered.

‘Negotiator say we have to stay with you,’ the Navigator replied. ‘We stay in your room all night.’

‘No, I don’t want that.’

‘I must, I must. Negotiator say you in shock.’

Hearing that, I wanted to tell the Negotiator everything I thought about him. But he wasn’t there and I had to vent my feelings of disgust and hatred to someone. So I rounded on the Navigator.

‘Did you know? Did you? That David had been killed?’

‘No, no – I in boat, I did not know.’ His tone was riled but still quite casual. I didn’t want to look at these men and yet I couldn’t expel them either. I threw myself down on the bed but I didn’t sleep, merely lay under the mosquito net thinking,
This cannot be happening. I want to wake up. Please let me wake up
. I had nothing to cling to beyond the hope that if I could get through the night then in the morning I might be shown some compassion, permitted to go home to my son.

The pirates, who had insisted on intruding upon me for some idea of my own good, sat slumped against the wall and amused
one another. I could tell they had been chewing
khat
. They chatted away, played avidly with their phones, swapped them back and forth to look at pictures, the little glowing screens illuminating the room’s dark corner. The Navigator sparked up a cigarette. I shouted at him to stop. He didn’t. Money looked over at me and laughed. Their blatant, crushing disregard seemed intended, somehow, to set the seal on the most terrible day of my life.

Dawn found me alone again, numb, emptied, desolate. I could feel in my chest the hard stone of a stark and awful realisation:
David’s not going to come for you. You’re not going to be saved – you never were. Your whole dream that he would sort this out – it was over before they even dragged you off Kiwayu Island. Nothing was true, nothing you were clinging to had any substance. David’s gone
.

How could it have happened? What injuries had they inflicted on him? Why? I built scenarios in my head, bitterly. When they had raided our
banda
that night, perhaps they hadn’t bargained on their victim putting up a fight. But they were carrying guns. And clearly their concern for human life was zero.

When food came I couldn’t bear to look at it. I was sick to my stomach. All I wanted was news that I would be flown home, that some sense of shame had overtaken the Negotiator and Fat Man. But nothing happened, nothing changed.

My despondency, my loneliness, felt total and consuming. I had no one – no one to talk to, no one to share an embrace or even the merest shred of comfort. I sat down and I wept.

After a while I realised I was causing a disturbance outside. Hungry Man glanced in, darted off, and in short order he was back, at his side the Navigator, who beheld me with the look of someone who had drawn the short straw for an unpleasant chore.

‘Why you cry?’

‘
Why?
You know why.’

Hungry Man tapped the Navigator and muttered something to him. The Navigator turned to me.

‘This man, he says you maybe get a new husband? When you home you will look for a new husband?’

‘No, I will not,’ I said quietly, stunned yet further by this stupefying discourtesy. But the Navigator seemed to be of the same mind as his accomplice.

‘Yeah, is no problem. Your husband dead – you go home, get other husband.’

He had to be cracked in the head to believe this, and I felt I had to disabuse him of it.

‘No, no way. I don’t want another husband.’

‘Why not?’

He then launched into a complicated explanation – from what I could make out – of an Islamic custom he called
iddah
, how if a Somali woman was widowed then she observed a waiting period of four months and ten days, long enough to ensure she was not pregnant by her late husband. It also allowed time for some kind of cursory mourning, after which she was free to remarry, often to a brother-in-law if not a new man – a simple enough matter given that Somali men were allowed multiple wives.

None of this touched in the slightest on what marriage meant to me: the desire for a lifelong union with a soul’s mate, ‘until death us do part’. That was the marriage I’d had: I wasn’t interested in a lecture on some poor alternative version. Wanting to hear no more I put my face in my hands and wept. But the Navigator seemed doggedly set on being ‘firm’ with me, to the point of impatience.

‘Look: David die. Who else in your family die? Your father, where he?’

‘My father is dead.’

‘OK! Father dead, see? So, people die. No problem. Why you cry? Your father die – people die.’

I tried to look him in the eye and get something important through to him. ‘Yes, people die. But when you’ve been with a husband for thirty-three years, that is hard. You understand? If you died, your wife would cry for you, wouldn’t she?’

He mulled this over. ‘Ah, yeah. My wife would cry …’

Undeterred, he set off on another story from his own experience, of how his firstborn son had died as a baby. It was a tragedy, clearly – one I wouldn’t have wished on my worst enemy. But what he seemed to want me to appreciate was that his baby boy had gone to a better place. That belief consoled him. It was part of his faith-based philosophy:
You are here awhile, you live, then you die, and you go to a different world.
Hungry Man nodded in agreement as he listened. I’d always had a feeling he was especially religious.

But nothing the Navigator said, however personal to him or deeply felt, was going to bring me a morsel of comfort. Having no faith in any god, I couldn’t take the consolation he had found. My credo had always been to try to make the best of life, because this life is all we have. So I couldn’t pretend to buy the wishful idea that I would be reunited with David in some afterlife. He and I had had our life together – it had been such a good and happy one – but it had been cut off, violently, and far, far too soon, because of the criminal actions of this gang of thieves. And if the Navigator really believed all this had in fact been ordained by some higher power – that was, to me, somehow even more despicable.

I was sitting with David: we were at home together, on our sofa, facing one another. Everything about our situation was normal, familiar, reassuring – but for the fact that what David was telling me, calmly and quietly, was that he was going to die.

‘Isn’t there something we can do?’ I pleaded. ‘This can’t just be it.’

‘There’s nothing. You’ve got to be brave. But you’re going to be OK. And I’d rather go like this than have to tell Ollie I’ve got some kind of terminal illness. I wouldn’t want him to see that, or you. This is all right, this is OK
…
’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t accept it. There must be something I can do to stop this happening …’

And then I woke up again, in my Somali prison – very shaken, anew, by that endlessly renewable power of dreams to pass for reality. I had believed with all my heart that David was beside me, his presence warming, consoling, despite all the dark things he seemed to say. Instead I had to face the day alone – more truly and terribly alone than I’d ever felt.

I got up and I walked, because I felt I had to; there was no alternative. Otherwise I would curl up, cry, lose hope. It was an especially hot day, and beyond the door the compound seemed deserted. I didn’t realise it at first, I was sunk down so deep in misery, but I was crying anyway – and then I saw Smiley Boy at the door, unsmiling, in fact looking panicked and annoyed. And then I could hear myself. I was moaning, chanting almost, like a mourning rite: ‘David. How am I going to live without David?’
My shoulders twitched with my sobs. I was shaking my head, wringing my hands. I was a mess.

The Smiley Boy shook his own head, disapproving yet flummoxed. It had to be that the Navigator wasn’t around and couldn’t be summoned to give me one of his futile talkings-to. So the Boy summoned his initiative and wagged a finger at me, as if to say, ‘Stop!’ I couldn’t oblige him. Finally he gave up, stomped out. I sat down on the bed and cried myself out, until I was spent, exhausted. I had to ask myself how much longer I could go on.

And something inside me answered:
You’re going to go on for as long as you have to. Pull yourself together.

I couldn’t just turn off my tears, dam up the sorrow that threatened always to rise in my chest. But with the self-control I had to call upon I knew I had to find a way to cope, or else things, abysmal as they were for me, could yet get worse.

For instance, my crying brought pirates into the room, and certainly brought out the worst in them. They would be angry, would shout and gesticulate at me. The Triumvirate pirates didn’t like my distress one bit. Money came in at one point, and his reaction was to wave his gun at me and make a contemptuous
pfft
sound with his lips. Smiley Boy would just guffaw whenever he saw me crying. Such reactions certainly succeeded in exacerbating the pain I was in. They were stunningly disrespectful – as if human life were negligible, sensitivity a foreign or useless emotion.

So I made an inward vow that I could permit myself only brief and controlled interludes of sorrow. If I was going to get out of this place – and I was – then I needed to be sane and strong. I
had to avoid the despondent, racking tears of self-pity, because at the end of that road lay utter breakdown.

At first I taught myself to cry in silence: a suppressed weeping, so that, though tears rolled down my cheeks, I made no sound.

Other kinds of ‘coping strategies’ seemed to come to me without premeditation. I found myself pushing aside the thoughts of my loss to focus on the dullest practical matters, a kind of lateral thinking.
How am I going to manage our
household
alone? What will it mean to cook for one person? Do I hold on to our car? It’s too big for one. Should I give up work? Or will I need work now more than ever …?

I realised I was doing this so as not to dwell on the brute fact that David was gone and I would never see him again. It was an insuperable task to stop him entering my thoughts unbidden. If I put him out of my conscious mind he appeared in my dreams. And the simple thought of a world without David – when everything we had done with each other was for each other – was unspeakably bleak. Deprived of that great bond in life, what was I going to do for myself?

I was frightened of letting my mind run off in that direction, making me thoroughly miserable and depressed, which I couldn’t afford. I needed a more defined mental discipline. And my working life, thankfully, had some examples to offer.

A few years previously I had helped to run a group for women with schizophrenia, some of whom suffered constantly from hearing voices in their heads that they couldn’t switch off. I got acquainted with a body of therapeutic thought that argued that these voices
could
be silenced by basic techniques, such as addressing oneself to the voice: ‘OK, I’ve had enough of you now, don’t want to hear you any more. I’ll talk to you later.’ My colleagues and I discussed these techniques with our patients and
certainly it worked for some of them. Now I believed I could make use of a similar discipline.

When my thoughts – about David, about home – threatened to overturn me, I instructed myself inwardly:
Stop thinking about that now. It’s just not doing you any good. Think about something else – about how long before your next walk. Think about checking your blisters before you start. Think about that gecko climbing the wall over there. Where’s he come from? Is it a he or a she? How do you tell …?’
In this way I could drag my train of thought onto a different track.

At work I had also become conversant with DBT,
Dialectical
Behaviour Therapy, a form of psychotherapy designed to enable patients to control their emotions, in essence by thinking of their brains as having a logical side and an emotional side, and working on means to give the logical side pre-eminence. What I now devised in my head was a kind of organising system for sifting my thoughts and putting them into compartments, so that I could tell myself,
It’s just not helpful for me to have this thought in mind right now; it needs filing away for another time.

Not only thoughts but also people went into my mental filing cabinet, and, sad to say, David was filed to the very back, because I couldn’t bear it otherwise. Every day I thought about him – I gave myself a daily allowance of ‘Thinking Time’ when I could open the cabinet – but for a strictly limited period, after which he’d have to be returned to the drawer. If it was an unnatural thing to be rationing my grieving, I was in an unnatural situation, feeling my very sanity to be at stake. In my heart I knew there would be a time to grieve for David, deeply and truly and properly. That time wasn’t now: it couldn’t be done. I had to focus on surviving, on getting back home to our son.

I knew my discipline wouldn’t be watertight, and it wasn’t. Sometimes the emotion just broke free, I couldn’t ward it off, the tears came, and I would hear the nearest pirate scampering off to get the Navigator. But I practised and practised, and chided myself for lapses, and very slowly I got better at it.

A few days after the fateful call with Ollie I was pacing the room, allowing myself to think about David, and how he would have managed if he had been with me in captivity. I had a sense that, for all his great strength of character, he didn’t have those ‘coping’ strategies which my working life had armed me with. He was someone who had to be in control of his environment. I couldn’t see how he would have accepted or tolerated the condition of being kept hostage. He would have looked for ways to escape, ceaselessly, yet without any hope or prospect, and that would have made for a battle in his head. I was sure, too, that it would have crucified him to see me being treated so poorly, when he could do nothing about it.

In that moment I suffered a sudden, drastic lapse of drive and concentration, my mental defences were breached and the dark thoughts rushed in on me.
If David couldn’t cope, how will I? I can’t get through this, no, it’s hopeless, I won’t be able to bear it.

And then the strangest thing happened. I felt the gentle pressure of a clasp on my hand, and in my head I heard David’s voice, true as life, as clear as my dreams:
You’re going to do this. I know you will. You’re much stronger than me.

The moment passed. I knew it had taken place nowhere but in my head. I was alone in the room. But I had felt a presence, strongly, undeniably. And the presence had brought a message, a reminder of what I knew David would have wanted me to do – not to give up, no way, but to fight on. Ollie had urged me to do the same. And he was in his own ordeal, having to cope with the
death of his father, the kidnap of his mother, and the huge burden that had been placed on his shoulders. So fighting on was what I was going to do – for him, and for David.

All the anger and resentment I had felt towards my captors before I knew of David’s death were as nothing to the hatred I now harboured for them, with the truth finally out. And this was a new feeling for me, disconcerting in its virulence. I had never hated anyone before – I didn’t honestly recognise the emotion, much less that it could be so strong. It was hard for me to so much as look at these people, who had caused David’s death and so ruined my life and my son’s. But then they seemed essentially oblivious. From my cell I could always hear laughter and shouts in the compound, the slamming down of dominoes onto the floor where the pirates sat in the shade. I thought,
How dare they? How dare they enjoy themselves, after what they’ve done, what they’re doing?

And yet my logical mind told me an uncomfortable, undeniable truth. If I was to get through captivity, if the days were to be manageable, I had to get along with them. I couldn’t waste every day confronting them, rebuking them, remonstrating with them. It wouldn’t do me any good, not emotionally nor in terms of my material well-being. I had to be methodical, businesslike, ensure that there were pirates I could deal with, to whom I could make requests, so I could obtain whatever small conveniences were allowed me.

I was trained in social work to be non-judgemental. I had worked with, supported and helped people who had done dreadful things: women who had murdered their children, men who were rapists or child molesters. The nature of the job was to set
aside any instinctive aversion to the person and look for a way to create a relationship. And I still had that ability, even in a situation where the victim of the offence was me.

Something I cottoned to quickly in the days after I learned of David’s death was that both the Leader and Money had disappeared. This couldn’t be an accident, in my view. They had been together at the scene of the crime, and they knew I knew that – as did the pirate leadership, who had surely decided now to get them out of the way for a while. The business of piracy was kidnap and extortion, grave crimes in themselves, but the Leader had added murder to this gang’s offences.

As for the Navigator, he had protested that David’s death was none of his doing, he hadn’t known about it. The former was clearly true, at least. Every day he looked in on me, still trying to present a friendly face. And I knew that if I didn’t deal with him then I would have to revert back to the square-one strategy of trying to make myself understood by noises and gestures.

More than ever before I needed to know the time of day – the exact time. Relying on imagined divisions of the day between the
muezzin
’s calls to prayer was no longer adequate. So on one of the Navigator’s drop-ins I asked him if he could get me a clock, in order that I could time my walks properly. There and then he unstrapped the digital watch he was wearing, a black plastic Casio, and handed it to me. This was uncommonly good service. Then again, I’d noticed that whenever I asked him for something he had to first take that request to the Triumvirate. This time he might have found it less trouble to resolve the matter on the spot.

From then on, knowing the three-hour time difference between Somalia and the UK, I made a decision about my breakfast. Although it was delivered invariably around 7.30 a.m., I chose not to eat until 9.30 a.m. – in the knowledge that back in
England it was 6.30 a.m., and Ollie and Saz would be getting up in their flat in Watford, thinking about a bite to eat for themselves. And so I ate my grim potatoes in solidarity with them, and in time for my ten o’clock walk.

The watch helped me synchronise my ‘Thinking Time’, too. I thought of work a lot: my colleagues, their routines, mine. I’d look at the watch and wonder:
12 noon Somali time is 9 a.m. UK time. That’s when the social workers have their handover meetings. They’ll be going into training room.
I knew where everyone sat, visualised them taking their usual places …
Then if it’s Thursday, from ten to twelve is the drug and alcohol group …

My job was important to me. I resolved I would go back to work.
If I’m back by December I’ll take that two-week holiday and then I’ll go back in. It’ll be difficult but I’ll do it.

I thought of my mum, her routine, her Saturday out with friends – how I had missed her ninetieth birthday just past, for all my urgings to the Negotiator that I be freed in time for that anniversary. But I had to keep clear of things that were too strongly emotional. I had to be regimented, resolved and cold.

My exercise book became an important measuring tool – I resolved to use just a page a day. Would I fill it before it was time to go? If so would I be given another? Did I need to make this one last?

I carried on with my list games – TV programmes, artists’ names – and tried to devise some quirks. If I were running a cake shop, what sort of wares would I bake to sell? Angel cake, banana cake, cheesecake, and so on. And how did I make them?

I would write out an especially long word and try to make smaller words from the letters within it; then count how many times I had used particular words. For whatever reason, ‘rage’ and ‘sane’ seemed to recur with regularity.

I also began to write motivational messages to myself along the tops of the pages and down the sides, so I could flip through and see them always. The ones that occurred to me were things Ollie had said to me in his calls:
I love you, I need you, be strong; It’s only a matter of time; Keep walking to the future.
I found them truly sustaining, and a kind of driving force. I read them every day. Sometimes, at particularly dark times, I would read them every half-hour, and repeat them as I was walking round the room. Each step I took, I told myself, was a step towards Ollie, towards home and freedom.