A Long Walk Home: One Woman's Story of Kidnap, Hostage, Loss - and Survival (15 page)

Obviously this was why the compound was a veritable arsenal of weaponry – not simply to control me but to meet outside aggression. The pirates routinely stripped and cleaned their guns,
like a decently drilled militia. Each man had his own assigned firearm, ‘personalised’ by little rags of assorted colours that were tied to the barrels. Even Smiley Boy came in to me one day waving a rifle and making
pew-pew!
sounds, like a kid playing with a pointed stick. I really hoped he knew how the safety catch worked.

One day in my room I nearly jumped out of my skin on hearing a volley of gunshots close by, and I stuck my head warily out of doors. Vain Man was firing his
AK
47 against the compound wall, quite freely. The Navigator hastened up to me to explain.

‘No problem, no problem, we practise …’

I could see Vain Man was aiming at a notional target. Another pirate, though, was just discharging his rifle into the air,
exuberantly
, as if he were celebrating a wedding in Canaan, and since he clearly didn’t appreciate gravity, or the idea of bullets falling to the earth with terminal velocity, I prudently returned to my room.

‘Practice’ became a weekly affair, but thereafter the pirates got in the habit of warning me in advance. One particular day, though, proved different. It was two o’clock, and I was walking, when suddenly I heard lots of gunfire – lots of different-sounding guns, and beyond the compound walls, though not far off. There were whistling sounds, then
tap-tap-taps
like short bursts of fire. I looked out to see pandemonium on the terrace and in the yard: scurrying, commotion, confusion. Vain Man had taken charge, was barking orders, organising people. He sent assorted pirates running off in various directions out of the compound, and posted Hungry Man and Limping Man outside my door. I wasn’t surprised Hungry Man had been kept from any front line: he seemed a non-martial sort, happier sweeping the compound or ironing his shirts pristine.

Shortly the Navigator rushed in on me, carrying a rifle and a sort of combat vest with square pockets that bulged with boxes of ammunition. His rifle looked old and battered, its strap tatty and threadbare. The Navigator had never been one to join in the group cleaning and disassembling of weapons. Now he looked out of his depth, scared, visibly shaking.

‘What’s going on? Is it other pirates?’

‘No problem, you stay here.’

I wasn’t going anywhere. But equally there was quite clearly a problem. ‘Are you OK?’ I asked.

‘Ah, I never had gun before. Never fire gun.’

He rushed out again. I looked to see Hungry Man and Limping Man sitting on the worn earthen steps to the covered walkway, but Hungry Man waved me back and out of sight.

As the sounds of what was evidently a gun battle kept growing louder and fiercer, and seemingly right outside the compound, I could feel terror rising in me. I no longer felt remotely safe. It sounded to me like, despite previous assurances, this ‘safe house’ was being raided. And if I wasn’t shot and killed in some insane crossfire then I would be retaken, by some new set of violent, hostile, trigger-happy goons.

Utterly gripped by fear I sat on the floor by my bed, crouched with my hands over my ears against the din from outside. Gradually I slumped down and curled into a foetal position, desperately wanting this to end.

There, in the panic of it all, my mind wandered and strayed into wild imagining. I had a vision in my head of an invading band of pirates, pulling the room’s window clean out of its frame, climbing in, hefting me up into a fireman’s hold and carrying me off, like a chattel – a daylight replay of my living nightmare on Kiwayu. It was as if I could feel myself bouncing about like a
rag doll on some man’s broad shoulder, being dragged through bush, scratched by thorns … For a time that I couldn’t measure, these figments appeared to me as absolute reality. And yet part of me knew all too well I was slipping away; I was ‘losing it’.

I had to fight, mentally, calling on whatever solid moorings of consciousness I could, to pull myself round.
You’re here. The ground underneath you is what’s real.
I could feel my spread fingers scratching the gritty floor, a real and harsh sensation: I knew I had retreated to the corner of the room, and was pulling up the linoleum. I put my fingers before my eyes, saw they were red raw. I could hear the guns still. But I was no longer hallucinating. My fears were real, but no longer enhanced by fevered imaginings. If I was scared I was also sobered.
This is bad. But you cannot lose your mind, you mustn’t.

I stayed huddled, the gunfire continued. But gradually it seemed to turn sporadic, and then to abate. I could hear footfalls, troops returning to the compound. Another pirate looked in, bearing one of the big rifles with a tripod fixing. Bizarrely, round his waist he wore a bright orange chiffon sarong, sequined flowers sewn on it – the strangest battledress one could imagine.

‘Is OK now,’ he said.

Vain Man led a larger group back through the compound gates. He wore the look of a conquering hero, proudly silent amid the excited chatter of the others. Whatever had brought about this ‘contact’, it was clearly over. I breathed more easily.

The Navigator, no doubt greatly relieved himself, came to see me and to explain. What was going on, he said, was a skirmish between rival local clans. A neighbouring clan had trespassed on this village, and tried to seize a patch of grassland for their goats. The village had had to muster against this aggressive intrusion – successfully, it seemed. I asked if anyone had been hurt.

‘The other clan, some of them wounded. In their arms and their legs. And I think some die.’

Just like that
, I thought.
All over some pasture for goats.

‘But none of these pirates got injured.’

He shook his head.

Unease and restlessness rose up in me with a vengeance, the more precarious my situation seemed. I felt dangerously in the dark about external matters, found myself starting to think,
Maybe nothing is happening. Maybe I’m here for ever
… It was hard to hold back such thoughts, however briefly they came, since I had no solid evidence, no trustworthy advice, to shore up against them.

One afternoon the Navigator came in, affecting his conspiratorial air, and started to tell me yet again that I was going home because money had come through.

‘People in Nairobi, they know you, they give money.’

‘But
no one
knows me in Nairobi,’ I snapped. Still I wanted to grasp at hope. I was so desperate for some real, honest news of what was happening to me. Could there have been some separate effort on my behalf by the British Embassy, initiated, maybe, by the Englishman I spoke to all those weeks ago? The Navigator insisted, ‘People give money.’ But it seemed to me I was being told whatever occurred to them, as if it might keep me quiet or incurious.

‘I don’t believe you,’ I said. ‘I want to speak to the Negotiator. I need to know exactly what’s going on.’

I was stroppy, because I felt I could push him as I couldn’t the others. He went off. Amina came in not long afterwards and I tried to grill her too. ‘We hear nothing,’ she said. The Navigator came back and said, ‘Negotiator come this afternoon.’

‘I hope so,’ I shot back.

The Negotiator eventually came with Fat Man, who wore a face as black as thunder, followed by his creepy Sidekick. Amina and the Navigator were in tow. I decided to put the Navigator to work as a translator.

‘Ask the Negotiator, is there money coming or not? I want to know.’

The Navigator started to relay something in Somali. But it was Fat Man, not the Negotiator, who responded, irately. Instead of his usual slack, hostile stare he came forward, stared hard at me. Thrown offguard, I was determined not to blink. Finally he turned away, spat out some words, angrily. His Sidekick mirrored his anger as they stomped out.

The Negotiator looked at me levelly, gravely. ‘You’ve made the Big Man very angry. He say you
shot
tomorrow.’

‘What?’ I blurted out in shock.

‘You hear! He say we shoot you tomorrow. We
fed up
of you.’

‘Well, I’m fed up of you.’ I regretted that comeback instantly, knew I should have bitten my tongue, since the gravest threat had just been uttered against me. And yet somehow I couldn’t believe my situation could get worse. The look on the Negotiator’s face, though, was horribly convincing. He turned and left, and the Navigator followed. The threat stood: a sentence of death had been passed.

My mind reeled. Was it to be summary execution? In the morning, was I going to be stood up before a firing squad?
Blindfolded
, or allowed to face the executioner? Or just pushed down to my knees and despatched with a bullet in the back of the head? Who would pull the trigger on me? How would Ollie get the news? Would they return my corpse or dump me in the desert …?

Amina stood there looking at me still. There was something solicitous in her face, as if she saw my upset without quite understanding it.

I looked at her, helpless, feeling tears welling in me, and with my index finger I mimed the universal gesture of a straight slash across my throat.

‘Me die tomorrow.’

‘Oh no, no, no!’ she said. She sat down on my bed and beckoned me to join her, then took my hand in mine and stroked it, looking consolingly into my eyes. She knew, for sure, that I was desperate, scared, in misery. And for that she extended some comfort to me, as if it were instinctive.

We sat there for some time, an hour at least, as the sunlight through the eaves of the room faded and darkness began to close in. We did not speak. Finally she patted my hand with hers.

‘
Berri
,’ she said. Tomorrow. And she pointed to me. ‘You eat.’ Did she mean my last meal? I couldn’t be sure. Then she left, and I was alone. It had gone 5 p.m.

Soon afterwards, I smelled the food for the pirates. My congealed rice was delivered at 6 p.m. I was battling in my head: how easy would it be for them to shoot me and get rid of me? I had to draw on my logical mind, expurgate the emotions.
Close the negative drawer, open the positive, take out what helps you, what makes sense. You were kidnapped for money. If you’re dead you have no value any more. They’ve spent a lot of money on you already: they need a return on that. In the cold light of day they’d not be so stupid as to shoot their meal ticket …

Still, I hardly slept that night.

The next morning at 7 a.m. I commenced my walking, and my food came. I ate at 9.30 a.m., imagining Ollie at breakfast too. But I was living on the edge of my nerves.

The Navigator entered and I looked up at him. He didn’t smile. ‘Big Man not happy. But he not kill you …’

So, it was to be another ‘normal’ day, after all – not the day of my judgment, just one day nearer my release. I was better off, too, for having framed a strong argument to myself: that however they might intimidate me, they would be fools to kill me.

Still the precariousness of it all was in my thoughts not long after, when the Navigator came again to my room with the air of carrying a message.

‘Bad news,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘The old French lady – hostage? She die.’

I found this perturbing. ‘Oh my god, really? You mean she died in captivity?’

He nodded. ‘Very bad. She sick, she need tablets, they not give to her.’

That was a sobering thought. Clearly, there was more than one way to die as a hostage in Somalia – neglect, lack of care, misunderstanding. In a place of limited resources, these, too, could be lethal. I was neither elderly nor disabled, but my body could not be immune to the effect of continued privations.

In the course of my night-washing routine I had begun to notice that sheets of my skin were peeling away from my body. My flesh was sagging loose: I could count folds where fat had once been, unwelcome evidence that I was shrinking. Undoubtedly I was losing more weight that I had realised.

And yet I felt no inclination to lodge a protest for improved food rations. I was quite certain – on the evidence of past (and very modest) such requests denied – that I would be ignored. And, at bottom, I just didn’t want to afford these pirates any more pleasure in the act of refusing me – in the smug sense that
hunger was a tool by which they could exert further control over me. I had to assert that I could manage. I knew that I could survive, at least, on little food. What felt more important to me was water – not to mention my book and pen, my means of mental engagement. But in other respects – in the physical sense – it seemed, somehow, that I was losing a degree of interest in ‘me’.

My body just looked tired: it wanted so badly to go home. It had spent too long under the wrong skies, in this alien, hostile environment where nothing was natural. The French woman’s tragic fate had given me a hard reminder to do all I could to look after myself. But I had no realistic hope of my rations improving. It seemed to me that mental strength and the correct management of my energies were the decisive elements I had under my control.

I was weary of cold-water washes, of feeling perpetually sweaty and ill-smelling without any relief. My headscarf had grown grubby and stiff with perspiration, but when I asked for a little Omo detergent to wash it, this was refused me. In the end I performed the task myself at night with soap, and put it on wet. But all these sensations were increasingly loathsome to me.

And then one day my ears picked up on a low hiss from outside, then a
drop-drop-drop
on the tin roof above me. I went to the door and I could see it was raining. I had smelled it before I saw it – that reviving smell of rain falling on dry earth. Pirates were crowding under the cover of the overhang, but I asked if I could go to the toilet. They looked at me as if I had sunstroke. However, I had a plan. And I took my time there and back, for it was such a joyous moment to stand and be exposed to torrential rain. I was content to be soaked, to feel cold. The pirates
laughed at me, evidently suspecting I was losing my mind. But I was quite clear that I wanted to be in the rain for as long as I possibly could. It made me feel alive again – whereas in that room the sensations felt more akin to slow death.