A Long Walk Home: One Woman's Story of Kidnap, Hostage, Loss - and Survival (13 page)

I hoped against hope that Ollie was managing to make some headway in the negotiations for my freedom, and I was desperate for news. The Navigator told me to expect a visit from the Negotiator within the week, and I clung to that. But he didn’t come, though I pestered the Navigator about this every day. ‘He away, out of the village,’ was a standard answer. I gathered that internet access was rare and at a premium, and the Negotiator needed to be online in order to do his business. But, as with nearly everything the Navigator told me, I couldn’t accept it as the unvarnished truth.

Despite the Negotiator’s no-show, the Navigator claimed one day to have better news for me. He came in grinning and said, ‘Money ready, you go home soon.’

‘How do you know this?’

‘Big Man tell me. Money ready.’

As much as I wanted to believe, I just knew that couldn’t be right. I had utter faith in Ollie, but I couldn’t see how he had put everything in order and to the pirates’ total satisfaction so quickly.

Then one morning I woke to the Navigator kicking the end of the bed. He had brought my morning potatoes, and he plonked the dish down on the table. ‘You eat quick! Negotiator is here!’

This is it,
I thought, exhilarated.
Better eat up. It could be your last food for a while. And get your things in order, ready for the road, for the airport if needs be.

Not long after, the Negotiator appeared at my threshold, wearing his green sarong and a white tight vest, with a chunky gold necklace. He picked up a plastic chair, put it against the wall by the door and sat, looking at me levelly.

‘I hear from your son.’

My heart surged, hoping he would say, ‘The money has come through.’

‘Very disappointing,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘He not raise enough money.’

My high spirits drained away. ‘That depends, doesn’t it, on how much money you’re asking for?’

His silent gaze indicated this was not a matter he wished to discuss with me. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said finally. ‘He and I will speak again. When we agree, the minute money come – you go home.’

It wasn’t, on balance, the worst progress report. He got up to leave, but I badly needed to feel I’d got something tangible out of his fleeting visit. I told him I wanted to be able to say a few more basic Somali words, other than just ‘thank you’ and ‘good morning’. Could he be of any help in that respect? He thought a moment, nodded, went away and came back with a small book.

‘This is my dictionary. You have this. You can take it home, if you like.’

He could stick that offer: I wanted no such souvenirs of this experience. But I held my tongue and thanked him. I knew I could make good use of his dictionary while I was stuck here.

The dictionary was no easy thing to browse, and I wasn’t about to sit down and devour it from cover to cover. However, I managed to locate the Somali words for days of the week (
isnin
,
talado, arbaco
, and so on). I wrote them out in my book, spoke them aloud. Pirates who glanced in seemed intrigued by this, and I was able to lure a couple of them into practising this translation exercise with me, taking turns over the recital of the Somali and English words. In the course of this they appeared to take some pride in teaching me a few additional terms: from ‘good night’ (
habeen wanaagsan
) through the items in my room (‘table’,
joodari
; ‘mattress’,
miisad
; ‘curtain’,
daaho
), to the much needed ‘toilet’ (
musqusha
).

These sorties across the language barrier did seem to encourage a bit of civility, as was borne out when the Navigator brought Hungry Man in to see me, bearing a little bottle of tablets with directions written in English.

‘My friend,’ the Navigator gestured. ‘He wants you to tell him, what this is for?’

‘He wants me to translate? OK.’

The medication was for a prostate condition, worryingly. But as I accessed the dictionary to find the corresponding term in Somali, the Navigator explained that the pills had been prescribed for Hungry Man’s father. And Hungry Man performed a little mime for me, of his father bending double and urinating with great difficulty – a more explicit demonstration than I required. Through the Navigator I told him how many times
a day his father had to dose up, and I wished the old man a speedy recovery.

I was paying a new close attention to my surroundings. For the first two weeks following my kidnap I had seen everything as temporary, too unpleasant to think about. Now I knew in my gut I was going to be here for a longer haul. I was going to have to settle in. And I wanted to start observing, noting what was around me, memorising everything I could – physical details that could be useful in a court of law.

I had always had good powers of observation and recall, but my work sharpened them further. Part of my job was to do risk assessments for particularly difficult patients who were requesting home visits. I had to assess the viability of these requests, to visit the premises where the proposed visit would take place. And for that purpose I developed a near-photographic memory. Where did the house sit on the street? Was it detached or terraced? By what door did you enter? How many doors were there? Could someone abscond out the back? How long was the garden? Was there a gate? How high was the hedge? Low enough to jump over? …

One of the room’s double doors was always open, so I could see the far wall of compound. I would sit at an angle to the curtain so that when the wind blew it open I could see briefly what was going on. But I was increasingly intrigued by the windows in my room. Was there still a world outside?

Often I could hear children laughing, as if in a schoolyard. There was a time every day when a goat went past, bleating, a small girl’s voice chatting away to it. I was keen to try to sneak a peek outside, but afraid of someone seeing me.

A highly useful phrase I gleaned from the Somali dictionary was
Daaqad furayya fadlan?
(‘Window open, please?’). I made a point of trying this out on whichever pirate brought me my potatoes in the morning, and if I got lucky then a set of shutters would be opened, the curtains then redrawn and pegs reinstated.

My main target was the left-hand wall window that could be seen only obliquely from the door. As I went round, I would ‘worry’ the middle peg in the curtains slightly so that it loosened and finally fell off. I checked no one had heard, made another circuit, then I’d peek through the slit, furtively. I had two headscarves, and I dropped one on the floor between the chair and the table. I’d pretend to be picking up the scarf to disguise my peeking.

Through this window I could see buildings close by, surrounded by high thatched fences, with corrugated roofs. To the right one building was very long. If I was lucky I glimpsed the young girl leading her goat under the window. Immediately in front of me was a corrugated gate into a compound, where the house had a red door. To the right of the window there was another corrugated gate and one afternoon I watched a young boy trying to open it, succeeding after a long struggle.

It wasn’t a visual feast through that window. But it became a big part of my world. I didn’t want anybody outside to see me in case they told the pirates I was looking out. At the same time I wondered: did some of them already know I was behind the curtain? Were the villagers fully aware there was a white woman in their midst, that pirates were operating next door to them?

Whatever the truth, I intended to keep up my peeking. It brought a pleasing sense of doing something the pirates didn’t know I was doing: a little oneupmanship.
You think you’ve got
me, that you can break my spirit, but you won’t. That’s going to remain intact.

Amina continued to visit me whenever she called into the compound. We would bow to each other, shake hands. And now I could greet her in Somali. I was happy enough to see her, always. And yet she had become a puzzle to me. For all the kind gestures she made to me covertly, I wondered how, as a woman, she could go on being party to my imprisonment, knowing that my husband was dead and my son struggling to barter for my freedom thousands of miles away. Couldn’t she do more to help me?

The Navigator told me she kept a shop in the village and had been engaged to cook for the pirates and, rather less fastidiously, for me. So there was no point in pretending she wasn’t up to her neck in this criminal operation. She also laundered and pressed the pirates’ clothes – very professionally, too, since the men were routinely clad in shirts and trousers with sharp creases. (Hungry Man, I noted, seemed to be alone in insisting on doing his own ironing.) The pirates evidently saw her as a matriarchal figure, and she would shout at them cheerily and share jokes.

I had to accept Amina was profiting from my captivity: it had to be a good earner for her. Was it one she couldn’t say no to? I couldn’t really see what else she would do for a living. Life for Somali women looked to me like an awful lot of work and subservience, from dawn through to dusk. Religion seemed to deprive them of much say over their lives. They worked hard with their bare hands, and no mod cons, leaving things to dry on
sunbaked
stones. It was a way of life that probably had persisted for generations, and didn’t look likely to change any time soon.

Even if Amina had had the slightest urge to help me out of my predicament, I couldn’t imagine what she would do, or to whom she would protest. In the end I had to take the view that, for all her smiles and the small favours she sent my way, she probably looked on my being held here as strictly business. And that was a bit sickening. It depressed me to think about how corruption could spread, become habit-forming, once immoral behaviour became part of a community’s accepted way of life.

One morning as I came out of the toilet I was stunned to see – in the company of the Beautiful Woman who was delivering the pirates’ breakfasts – a young black boy of six or seven years, blindly following in tow, bearing a stainless-steel dish with a lid on it. The boy and I exchanged bewildered looks, and I had an urge to cover my face with my scarf – it didn’t seem right to me that he should have to clap his young eyes on any part of the iniquitous set-up inside this compound. After he had gone I felt indignant that he’d been drawn into this sordid world, made to help feed these thugs who wore guns on their shoulders. I told the Navigator what I had seen, and with an appalled expression on his face he denied it hotly. ‘No, no, that cannot be.’

I didn’t see the boy again. But whatever the Navigator really believed about the need to keep minors shielded from criminality in their midst, the fact remained that he was either kidding me, or kidding himself.

My days felt changeless, interminably long and monotonous, hot, sticky and unventilated. I walked on and on, barefoot, for half an hour on the hour from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. – unless faintness came over me or the painful twinges of my blisters became
unmanageable. Even then, I would try to walk on the edges of my feet, just in order to keep with the programme.

When I wasn’t walking I counted: the 170 sets of vertical patterns on the curtains around the room; the 110 nails through eyelets that kept the curtains hung up; the 9 nails on one leg of my bed, the 5 on another. I practised yoga and deep-breathing exercises, cross-legged on the floor, and at times, peering down out at the coral-pink lino, I amused myself by seeing shapes within the patterns – an elephant, say, or Queen Victoria’s profile.

In this way I served my time.

Gradually it seemed that the Triumvirate had taken over from Smiley Boy in bringing me my food, but the diet was unvarying – although my grey potatoes sometimes had tiny bits of green pepper interspersed, and my rice was sometimes bathed in a flavourless red water. Outside the pirates routinely feasted on aromatic hunks of meat. Once I asked the Navigator and Hungry Man if I might have a little of the meat juices from their plate to flavour my dish. But I was refused. If I passed them en route to the toilet they stared at me as they chomped away. I returned to the room seething inside, but I was adamant I wouldn’t let them see me irked.

Every night at 9 p.m. I stuck my head out of the door and murmured
habeen wanaagsan
to whoever was posted there. Indoors I whispered my good nights to Ollie and to Mum, sent out good wishes and hopes that I would see them soon. (Talking to myself seemed a permissible vice in these circumstances.) Once in bed I never had trouble getting off to sleep for at least a couple of hours. But with regularity I would wake in the night and have to lie in the dark awhile until dropping off again. It was vital to me I get the sleep I needed in the hours of darkness – I feared the torpor of sleeping sunlit hours away, turning
day into night and night into day, losing that connection to normality.

My dreams were usually vivid, often warm and wishful. One night I found myself restored to the comfort of our home. I was in the lounge, the wood-burning fire was on, David was beside me and we were watching television. Our cat Otis was nestled on my lap, I stroked him and could hear – could even feel – his purr. David and I hardly spoke; we didn’t need to. Then I felt the dream fade, my eyes peeled open, and I realised my misery anew.

At such times I had to be brisk in my ‘self-comforting’, otherwise I wouldn’t have left my bed, wouldn’t have got down to what I needed to do to survive.
You’ve got your son, you’ve got your family,
I would tell myself.
You had a wonderful time with David. You couldn’t have wished for a better husband. You were lucky.
That much was true, however painful, and – mostly – it helped to keep despair at bay.

Hungry Man continued to give evidence of a special devotion to his Muslim faith, but also of some kind of fledgling interest in comparative religion. As he took me for a Christian, he wanted to know how and where and how frequently I prayed. I demonstrated the traditional posture of kneeling by a bedside with hands clasped and eyes closed. This struck him as a bit funny-peculiar – and me, likewise, since I was genuflecting to a faith that held no meaning for me. None the less I cheerily told Hungry Man I prayed every night, that I might return to my family and to my son, since the thicker I laid this on, the more I hoped these men might begin to feel some collective obligation. The image of the motherless child seemed to me a universally plangent one, but I was careful, too, to refer to Ollie as the ‘head
of the household’ in the wake of his father’s death. The pirates had a settled patriarchal view of the world, and here I felt the pragmatic choice was to play up to that.