A Long Walk Home: One Woman's Story of Kidnap, Hostage, Loss - and Survival (19 page)

Back in ‘my’ old room I noticed instantly that the table had been shifted to the far corner from where I had placed it. I was
irked.
Right, that’s getting put back tomorrow
, I thought. Grim as the space was, I had to live in it and I wanted it arranged as I saw fit. I replaced the pegs on the curtains and lay down to rest.

By 7 a.m. I was pacing around the linoleum floor again. Limping Man popped his head round the doorway and, for the first time, I saw a smile on his face. He was really happy to be back. I was just thankful for small mercies.

It was a reluctant companionship that I had with Ali, but it was the only one in the vicinity that was of any real use to me, and so I got accustomed to knowing how he was feeling. Back in the Big House he was soon complaining of a bad stomach ache.

‘Is the food. Bad food here, I not used to it.’

‘Tell me about it,’ I said, sympathetic only to a point, since his rations were princely next to mine. But I advised him to drink boiled water, and to stop chewing
khat
, which I had to suppose was detrimental to the digestive system. I asked whether Amina could get him peppermint, and I wrote down the word for him and her as reference. But the pain seemed only to worsen. He said it burned in his insides, he couldn’t lie out flat and had to sleep sitting up. He had stopped eating, and the effects were inscribed on his face: he looked gaunter than ever.

No sooner had I attempted these ministrations than I got sick myself, as if in solidarity. One morning I woke up with a fever, my head aching, forehead boiling hot, my throat on fire. I was shivering and found it a genuine struggle to raise myself off the bed. In my mind I was urging myself:
You’ve got to get up, you’ve got to walk, otherwise you’re not walking towards home
.

But by the time I was sitting upright it was clear to me I wouldn’t be walking anywhere for a while. My frail body felt heavy, every muscle ached, my feet throbbed. This hot, dark, sticky room felt like a dire place to fall ill, but ill I most certainly was.

I could hear pirates outside, laughing. I lurched to the door, stepped into the corridor, and they stared at me.

‘I’m ill, sick. Get me Ali …’

I went back inside, but no one came. I attempted a walk, but I just couldn’t get around. My feet were in agony, and I collapsed back onto the rackety bed. Again I dragged myself to the corridor, where the pirates were idly playing dominoes.

‘I’m
ill
. I
need
Ali!’ I looked hard at Gerwaine, clutched my throat to semaphore my discomfort, and pointed down the corridor to the room where I knew Ali would be sleeping.

‘Please get him, get him now!’

‘Ali asleep,’ Gerwaine said simply, and looked away with apparent disregard.

‘I don’t care. You must get him.’ I staggered back into the room and sat disconsolate on the bed. An hour passed. At one point I cried, with the sheer misery of how I was feeling: it couldn’t be helped. With difficulty I used the dictionary and pen and paper to source and write the Somali words for headache, sore throat, painkiller, penicillin, hospital. At last Ali came in, and I could see how badly he was feeling. But I needed him to see the same in me. I could barely open my eyes. Sweat ran off me; I couldn’t stop myself shivering. I gave him my scrawled piece of paper.

‘I’m sick. I need medicine, a hospital.’

He read the note and said, ‘There is no hospital here.’

‘Pharmacy? Chemist?’

‘No pharmacy.’

‘You’ve got to help. I’m sick.’

My distress, the sheer state of me, seemed to have got through, and past a clear reluctance to act. Finally he said, ‘I get you tablets.’ Off he went. Jamal and Vain Man came in, looked at me, muttered between themselves. I knew I looked terrible.

When Jamal returned he had pills for me. It was a relatively rapid response, confirmation to me of their vested interest in not letting me slip below a basic threshold of well-being. But I had
to swallow those pills in blind faith: they had no markings I could recognise.

As it was, by the next day I started to feel some relief. I slept a lot, unhappily, since I was frightened of getting disoriented in my routines, turning nocturnal. But I had to accept the bad shape I was in. I couldn’t eat for a couple of days. But then to my great surprise the Leader brought me a mug of broth, which tasted fantastically meaty. Later he brought me a knuckle of goat meat on the bone: my sore throat meant it wasn’t the easiest thing to eat but, my god, I persevered. Coming from this cold and
self-contained
man these were notable acts of consideration.

Although the feverish symptoms of my throat infection receded, they seemed then to mutate into a heavy cold. I asked for more medication, and was brought a little paper envelope containing four tablets labelled ‘Cold Tap’. I assumed they were paracetamol, and I gulped them down. But the cold kept me confined to bed, inactive, feeling much the worse for the place I found myself in, and generally very sorry for myself.

I hadn’t seen Ali since he’d reluctantly left his own sickbed to minister to me. I asked Mohammed where he was.

Mohammed said, ‘He very ill. Big Man take him to hospital.’

I wasn’t surprised to hear that they looked after their own better than me. With further questioning I established this hospital was five hours’ drive away. I did worry, with Ali not being around and me in a vulnerable state. If I really needed anything there was no one but him I could communicate with. No one else really understood. Even if I used the dictionary and wrote words down I couldn’t be sure. Some of the pirates couldn’t read, even in Somali.

While I recovered I did make one useful discovery via the dictionary. While flicking through it idly I found myself paying
attention for the first time to a list in the back of it, which gave the names of all the nations of the world plus their capital cities: Afghanistan/Kabul, Albania/Tirana, Algeria/Algiers, and so on. A new time-whiling game proposed itself to me. In my book I divided several pages into two columns, one of countries, one of cities, then covered one side with my hand and tried to make matches from memory, scoring myself out of 175. If not the most absorbing of puzzles on paper, the game quickly took on a mesmeric fascination for me.

It was evening and I was playing my countries-and-capitals game in my book when Ali reappeared at my door. He certainly looked a good deal improved, and was grinning from ear to ear.

‘I back, I back,’ he said.

‘Good news,’ I smiled. ‘You’re better?’

He nodded. ‘Doctor give me tablets.’ He showed me a packet. ‘Then Big Man pay for me to be in hotel in town – a hundred dollars a night!’ His value to this pirate operation was very clear.

Then he switched into conspiratorial mode. ‘I have news.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Big Man tell me in car when he drive me back. Money is almost there. In two weeks, you go.’

‘Did he really say that? You’re not just saying …?’

‘Oh yeah, really. In two weeks. Then you go, I go! I see my wife, you see Ollie.’

His enthusiasm was so pronounced, I didn’t need any more convincing. I gave myself permission to dream. If freedom was really two weeks away then I would be home for Christmas – home, even, for my birthday on 12 December! Excitement bubbled up in me. After Ali left I sat and pictured scenarios in
my head. Surely I was going to have to be delivered into Nairobi. It was the only hub I could imagine. Where was the nearest
airstrip
to here? No matter. I’d fly to Nairobi, where Ollie would be waiting for me. We’d get back to the UK on the next available flight – and in first class, if I could wing it, by any special pleading necessary. I thought too about what I would take with me, other than my books. Inside them were all the recommendations I’d carefully noted down from
The Strand
on the World Service: exhibitions to see, books I would read, music I’d listen to.

With my hopes high, the wonderful thought of my birthday, of Christmas, shared with Ollie back home … I permitted myself to open the drawer where I kept my thoughts of David, and to ponder how that homecoming, those festive occasions and celebrations were going to feel without him at my side. It made for sobering reflection; yet I knew it was the right thing to do. Whenever my ordeal was finally done I fully intended to put this place and these people behind me, but I would have to deal with the felt absence of David every day of my life.

My illness had depleted me badly, and even once the symptoms receded I found I wasn’t physically up to the task of resuming my full walking/exercising regimen as before. To ease myself back I decided not to walk at all between 1 p.m. and 3 p.m. I wanted to be as fit and well as possible when I climbed onto that plane taking me home.

The climate turned a little more inhospitable as November passed into December. The days remained hot but the nights grew windy and the temperature fell, from 6 p.m. through to around 9 a.m. the next morning. I found myself shivering in the mornings until the sun seeped through. At night I would take a
couple of the pegs holding the curtains that hemmed the walls, and use them to clasp the curtains by the metal doors into the room – a bit of improvised draught exclusion. And I slept with everything possible piled on top of my bed:
jilbab
, headscarf, even my going-away outfit.

I noted that in the mornings the pirates sleeping out of doors were wrapped up in blankets rather than sheets, and they kept the blankets round their shoulders as they smoked their first cigarettes of the day. I put in a request to Ali for a blanket of my own, but he didn’t appear to treat it with great urgency. When I reminded him he only waved a hand. ‘Yeah, yeah, it come …’ And soon a week had gone by with no sign of the much coveted blanket.

One evening after my ritual washtime I had put my dress back on and was on the point of stepping to the doorway to shout out yet another most likely unheeded call for a blanket when the Leader appeared at the threshold, holding in his arms a package wrapped in a polythene cover. With something approaching a flourish he pulled from the wrapping an evidently brand new blanket – blue and pink, fleecy and cosy-looking. I accepted this base-level creature comfort gladly, and I was struck once more by the Leader’s new interest in doing me small favours. Every time I saw him I was compelled to look him in the eye and hold his gaze, as if I might get some insight into his mind. Inside mine, the question was seared:
Was it you who killed my husband?
And however hard his outer shell, I sensed a wariness from him. He couldn’t stand too much of my stare: eventually he would look away, or down to his feet. And I had begun to wonder if these considerate gestures in my direction were not, from his impenetrable perspective, some sort of raw, fitful attempt to make a form of amends?

The Leader’s renewed presence around the compound had made for an interesting observable change, or clarification, with respect to the pirate command line. For one thing I had come to the conclusion that he didn’t ever spend a night inside the Big House, and would rarely be there for a full day. Ali had told me that the Fat Controller slept elsewhere in the village – in what he described, to my envy, as ‘a clean house’. I wondered if the Leader wasn’t a house guest of the Fat Controller in said ‘clean house’. I was certain he was being groomed, somehow, for a role in the pirate operation yet more senior than being in charge of the ‘active service unit’ that went out foraging to capture human bounty.

One morning, returning to my room, I got a glimpse through the door of ‘HQ’, Room 4, and I could see the Leader and Gerwaine in conference. The Leader was dressed rather in the fashion of a Maoist Red Guard, wearing a dark-green
short-sleeved
jacket and voluminously baggy pants that hung no lower than his calves – an outlandish outfit, to say the least. But there was nothing funny about the huge rubber-banded wedge of banknotes he was holding, fully six inches in depth, which he passed to Gerwaine who thumbed its shortest edge and then unfastened the float and began to count it out, as if dealing a deck of cards, into smaller piles. It was then that Gerwaine sensed my watching them.

‘Oh, Somali money!’ I blurted out, keen to sound innocent in my curiosity. Gerwaine smiled, took a 500-Somali-shilling note from one pile and waved in under my nose.
Pecunia non olet
, the Romans used to say, but these notes had a bad odour to them, and I flinched. Later that day Ali called in on me, nicely dressed for a visit to town, his shirt pocket stuffed with these 500-shilling notes, which the Leader had evidently distributed. (Each note, Ali told me, would buy him one cigarette.)

The Leader was certainly treated with something approaching reverence by the younger pirate ‘runarounds’, who kept out of his way, as opposed to how they thronged around the Triumvirate. The Leader was always punctilious about his prayers and seemed to come to the compound purposely to be with the other men at these times. I saw now that Vain Man, who didn’t usually pray, was careful to do so when the Leader was around: he appeared to be keeping himself somewhat in line. In other respects Vain Man did not strike me as a man who held himself to the strictest personal standards. And he was someone I knew I would be especially glad to see the back of.

At least, as I had with several other pirates, I established his name. One evening as I was returning to the room from the toilet he beckoned me to sit down with him and a few other pirates who were lounging about. ‘You spell your name?’ he said to me in English. I darted into the room for my book and pen, and when I came back I said to him, ‘
Magacaa
?’ He smiled and etched in my book,
KAALIM
. And then he displayed his penmanship to the rest of the group, as if serving notice of one more of his many abilities. I wrote my name, too, since he had asked, though no one paid it any mind.

If arrogance was Kaalim’s least appealing trait, his brusqueness came a close second. Although I didn’t feel actively menaced by him, he seemed to have a compunction to make things needlessly difficult for me. One day my lantern stopped working. I undid the casing and found the batteries had corroded. I stepped out to where the pirates were chatting, set down the lantern and said, with a shrug, ‘Broken.’ Kaalim came forward but only to shoo me back to the room with a disparaging flick of his hand. But a little later I received a visit from a recent addition to the pirate ranks, ‘Tall Man’ – a smiling, open-faced character, who seemed
a couple of years older than the rest of the crew and stood several inches taller, too, at around six foot four. He had brought me a replacement lantern, which worked perfectly – until Kaalim then tried to exchange it again with the old, corroded one to which he’d pointlessly added fresh batteries. I refused to put up with this, made a protest that was registered, and got Tall Man’s offering back.