A Long Walk Home: One Woman's Story of Kidnap, Hostage, Loss - and Survival (7 page)

Marvin came and beckoned me out of the car, his now usual role. My legs were jelly when I stood. Nothing was said. The Leader went to the back of the Fat Man’s Toyota, Marvin shoved me in the same direction. The vehicle had little platform steps, and inside it was fragranced with the cloying smell of Parma violets. I was in the middle once again, flanked by Marvin and the Leader. And there was another man, big, wearing sunglasses, whom I somehow hadn’t noticed until now – proof of my mental distraction, as he was clutching a huge machine-gun and had two ribbons of bullets across his chest.

Jesus Christ, this is serious,
I thought
. Stay calm, if you can.

Machine-Gun Man seemed to want as much distance from me as possible, but once the back doors were slammed we were all in a fearful crush, and that big gun was laid across our knees. The Fat Man took the wheel and we were off.

For these men what followed might have been a Sunday drive, chit-chat punctuated by laughter. I didn’t look at anyone, feeling clueless and dismayed. But I had to know one thing, and I asked with no idea whether or not they would understand.

‘Are we going to Mombasa …?’

Marvin said something to the others and they all laughed. So, I had my answer. I think I had known in myself for a while that they responded to my sporadic queries with whatever they thought might shut me up and keep me usefully calm and compliant. But knowing this for sure now didn’t help me with the brute truth that I had nothing else left I could rely on.

We drove on through country that became wooded, passing only one other car along the way. For a short while our route was obstructed by a pair of donkeys pulling carts piled high with firewood, until the Fat Man honked his horn. And we passed a lone round hut that seemed to have been constructed from branches and roofed by multi-coloured plastic bags. Such primitive conditions amid such a hostile environment filled me with cold foreboding.

In time a village came into view, on a plain surrounded by dunes and scrub brush. We entered, passing by a restaurant, a hairdresser’s and a pharmacy on the way. The village was long – many houses, lots of donkeys, but also a surprising number of four-wheel-drive cars parked about too. The Toyota began to slow down and turned a corner. Before me loomed the big grey steel gates of some kind of compound, criss-crossing spikes on top, standing open onto a yard. We pressed on through this entrance, pulled up, and the gates of my new prison closed immediately behind us.

Within those metal gates the first sensations to strike me were of searing heat and hard light bouncing off the thick stone walls of the enclosed yard. As many as fifteen men were thronging around the Fat Man’s car, all with shouldered rifles, all staring at me. I climbed out, dazed and scared. I had the sense these men had been expecting us – without knowing truly
what
to expect. And now they saw me, lurching from the Toyota, a slight woman in an oversized man’s coat, looking filthy, bedraggled, bloodied. They appeared to be every bit as puzzled by their new captive as I was wary of them.

The ground under my feet in the yard was sandy. The compound walls were plastered all around with some rough render. The wall facing me had obviously had a window in it at some point but the gap had been crudely plugged with rocks. As I was escorted around the Toyota I saw in the right-hand corner of the yard a sort of terrace with a sloping roof of corrugated iron, four doorways indicating rooms all in a row. This terrace had a covered walkway and a low wall of breezeblocks in front of it. The Fat Man, the Leader and their associates headed directly for the room at the far right of the terrace. Marvin pulled me towards the opposite end, taking me up steps formed in the dirt by foot traffic, through the metal double-doors furthest to the left.

Within was a gloomy room, maybe fifteen feet square, with a high ceiling to which plastic sheets bearing an Arabic pattern in bright blue and yellow had been nailed up. Nailed drape curtains – creamy and golden in bands, held together where they joined by three plastic pegs, red, green and yellow – also
masked the walls. There were no windows that I could see, and only a little natural light seeping in through breeze blocks set in the wall near the ceiling. On the floor was some coral-pink linoleum that didn’t fit the space, stopping underneath the rudimentary base of a bed at one side. The bed was of a size suitable for a small child, made out of odd pieces of wood crudely hammered together. As I was peering about me Marvin left the room. For the first time in days I felt properly alone, free of constant scrutiny.

My mind reeled. I wasn’t panicking but inside I felt a mob of emotions – fear, confusion, recrimination. The tale they had spun me of a reunion with David in Mombasa had, clearly, been an arrant lie. Given the arid landscape we’d driven through to reach this village I knew in my heart the most likely truth was what the Navigator had first told me on the boat: that we were in Somalia. My biggest worry was just how far inland I had been transported – and to where, exactly.

What could I possibly take now as a positive view on my plight? Evidently it was going to take longer that I had hoped to raise the money to free me – however much that was.

OK,
I told myself,
you’ve been unharmed to this point – more or less. You can’t do anything, can’t go anywhere, can’t speak to anybody. So keep your head, and see where this leads.

I sat there for perhaps a quarter of an hour, pensive, realising only belatedly that I still had the hood of my borrowed jacket up. I was cursing myself for how completely I’d accepted their prohibition on this when Marvin reappeared in the doorway.

‘You wash?’ he asked.

‘Yes, please,’ I replied. ‘Can I take this hood off?’

Inevitably he shook his head and indicated I follow him outside and down the covered walkway. A handful of men milled
around, bristling with guns. We passed two rooms with closed doors, and a third with one of its two door panels open, then stopped at an outhouse-type structure with a curtain over its doorway. Marvin gestured for me to enter.

‘No one come in,’ he muttered, positioning himself to stand guard.

Inside was dark and cooler, thanks to the curtain. I saw before me a couple of piles of sandbags, a black bucket filled with water – cold to the touch – a stainless-steel cup, and a change of clothes. I had hoped, forlornly, for a shower. There was no soap, nor anything with which to dry myself, but I understood by now that beggars couldn’t be choosers.

I undressed, gingerly, conscious once again of the livid extent of insect bites and scratches all round my body, even under my arms and breasts. Blood was smeared where I had scratched, and the abrasions were most painful at my waist where the waistband of the trousers had rubbed some of my skin raw. I rinsed myself down as best I could, though I felt stinging sensations where the wounds were deepest. It worried me, too, that the water might not be clean: another risk of infection. Still, the result was that I felt cleansed, to a degree, for the first time since I had been taken.

I rinsed my hair, too, then put on the clean clothes: an
oversized
red-and-black floral dress that hung from my shoulders, a sarong, a pair of grey jersey shorts bearing a Mercedes Benz logo, and a headscarf – evidently the new means by which I was to save all these big men from the upsetting sight of my hair. The shorts, I saw, had a drawstring – and straight away I knew what to do with that. Carefully I transferred my wedding rings from where they had nestled on the string inside my utterly bedraggled pyjama bottoms, and I tied them up securely inside the shorts using a triple knot.

Outside again I saw a portable electrical generator parked between Room 4 of the terrace and this storeroom. Then Marvin pointed out the toilet block, next door to some more sandbags by the front gates. I peered inside at a hole in the ground, a narrow ledge round the walls crowded with shampoo bottles and cigarette packets, a crude beam with nails acting as a hanger. My presence stirred up a cloud of flies. Evidently I would be sharing this with twenty men. I could not suppress a shudder.

I was taken back to the room, past the shiftless men, and left to my own devices. I lowered myself to sit on the bed and felt it judder under my weight. Still, a bed was a bed, better than a floor – which, I could now see, had a whole assortment of little bugs marching across it. In truth, the room seemed better suited to insect life than human habitation – the unwelcome intruder, if anyone, was me. But by now I didn’t feel so very averse to a few creepy-crawlies, as long as they weren’t going to get too curious about me. After those days in the mangrove forest I’d grown reluctantly accustomed to the sensation of them crawling across my skin.

I could feel a sort of calm settle on me. But I was keen to collect my thoughts, use this time on my own to formulate a plan for how I was going to approach this new phase of my predicament.

I had to expect I would be held here until a ransom was paid for me. So I needed to gird myself, call on whatever resources I had to stay strong – mentally occupied, physically fit – until they released me. I would have to devise a structure, a ‘routine’ that could occupy my days, however many of them lay ahead.

This need was inherent in me: I had always been the sort of person who required order and structure in order to feel assured and on top of things. Here, I was painfully aware that I had not 
one iota of control over my circumstances. All of that had been stripped from me the minute I was wrenched away from Kiwayu, and the disempowerment was painful to me. So I felt I had to claw something back, reinstate a bit of self-autonomy somehow – even if only of a symbolic sort.

My routine would have to include exercise. David and I had always gone running and used the gym, both to stay fit and as a means of winding down. Was there a way for me, even in these cramped, dark, deprived conditions, to keep active? Mulling it over, I began to pace out the length and breadth of the room. And, curiously, just walking round the space of my confinement made me feel a little better, somehow.

It seemed to me I ought to have enough stamina to walk for about half an hour, every hour of the day. And with that, my decision was made: regular walks would be my main routine. I made a mental note to ask my captors for a watch. Any kind of routine had to run to a clock, and in any case I wanted to know the right time for as long as I was stuck here.

While I paced, I could hear men outside, talking, laughing. Eventually Marvin returned, bearing a small ladder, accompanied by a woman dressed in the full enveloping
jilbab
and
khimar
. She was short and round, and the aroma of cooking fat came with her. But her face, perfectly framed by the
khimar
, was pleasant and her demeanour friendly. She carried bed linen, a pillow and a mosquito net. Marvin scaled the ladder and tried to secure the net to a wooden baton by bashing a nail into place with a rock. It took him three attempts with three different-sized stones. The woman, meanwhile, made up the bed, chatting away in my direction all the while, as if I could understand her every word. For all that I was baffled, I found her affable presence welcome in the circumstances. Her
jilbab
was a nice grey-pink shade, shot
through with silvery strands. ‘Very pretty, what you’re wearing,’ I said to her, gesturing from head to toe. She appeared to appreciate the compliment.

Marvin then hefted in a cardboard box that was filled with a dozen small bottles of water. I spotted a label of origin: Bosaso.

‘Bosaso, where is that?’ I tried asking Marvin.

‘Big town,’ he muttered.

I was glad of the water, and quickly decided that the cardboard container could serve as a bedside table for me. I was also given a battery-powered lantern, which shed enough light round the room to see and, perhaps best of all, a purple bar of Lux soap.

Then they were gone and I was alone again. Surveying the habitat – with the mindset of someone resolved to ‘get by’ – I decided that if this was my prison for a while then it could have been a lot worse. It was rudimentary, airless, but not uncomfortable – relative luxury next to the thorny shrubs of the mangrove forest. If I had to serve some time in this place, I believed that I could do it.

My solitude was disturbed by one of the guards from the yard stepping into the room. But the man didn’t say or do anything – he just loitered there for a bit, staring at me – then stepped out again. He was only the first of many who came in, apparently just to gawp at me, in the hours that followed. Some faces were friendly, others not. I wasn’t intimidated, was careful to meet their gaze, even to force a smile – since I knew that, whatever I thought about them, it would be better if they formed a good opinion of me.

It had got dark outside when the woman in the
jilbab
returned, on her own. She came towards me, bearing in her hands something
concealed by a red-and-white checked gingham cloth. At close quarters her face was open and wide, her skin beautifully unlined. I guessed she was maybe ten years younger than me. But I could also see that her hands were those of a woman who toils – the skin coarse, visibly worn by work.

She drew off the cloth to reveal a pair of samosas nestling in an aluminium bowl, exuding just-cooked warmth, smelling delicious. She put her finger to her lips and showed me a complicit smile – one woman to another, a gesture of surprising kindness. Was this an ally, someone I could trust? I accepted her gift gratefully, and after she hastened out of the room I devoured one of my two savoury treats, deciding to save the other for later.

From the bed I found myself studying those curtains around the walls. The pegs pinching them together had to be concealing something. The lantern picked out sequins sewn into the fabric that shimmered and glittered, making an incongruously pretty little light show. The silence was disturbed by a low ambient noise coming through the walls: my ears had detected it vaguely on a couple of occasions earlier. As I climbed under the bed sheet and nearer the wall, it became clearer still – one man’s voice, a melodic wail, singing in sentences at variable pitches. I decided it had to be the
muezzin
of a mosque, sending out the call to prayer. His voice filled every corner of the room, despite my muted hearing. I was in a village, and if the local populace was half as devoted as the men who kidnapped me then I imagined they would be answering the call, wending their way to the mosque.

I was afraid to drop off to sleep, alone, in a place like this. I said to myself, mantra-like, ‘This is temporary. It won’t be too long. You’re just going to have to get through it.’ But I was so tired that I knew sleep would be a blessing. And eventually I succumbed.

I was woken before dawn by the return of the
muezzin
’s low persistent wailing, his lone muted voice like a mournful clarion. The smoky smell of burning wood was pervading the room from outside. Reluctantly I knew I needed the toilet and, creeping out, I was met by the surreal sight of more than a dozen men sleeping in their shroud-like blankets. Five were directly outside my door, others sprawled around the yard. In the grey early light they resembled casualties laid out in the grim aftermath of some battle or massacre.

Back in the room I dozed off again. When I stirred, sunlight was coming in from the gap in the ceiling and a young man, tall, maybe eighteen years old, was peering at me through the mosquito net.

‘El-lohhh!’ he said with the widest of smiles that showed off the whitest teeth, a perfect set of gnashers that would be the envy of a Beverly Hills dental clinic. He had brought me a thermos container, burgundy-coloured, with a screw top. Inside I found boiled potatoes, roughly diced.

My sheet was pulled up to my neck to preserve my modesty. He could see my hair but I thought, ‘Really, what’s the worst that could happen? He’ll not be struck down dead.’ The boy gave no indication of being bothered.

I nodded acknowledgement to the boy and he backed away and out. I had slept naked, and I knew I had to dress quickly and get my headscarf tied in place, or else risk incurring the wrath of the most pious among my kidnappers.

I pondered anew what should be the plan for my walking routine. Should I try to walk for an hour, say, then give myself an hour off? No, that was too arduous. Stepping about the room
confirmed for me an impression I’d formed the day before, namely that there were lots of stones stuck underneath the linoleum, some of them quite big and sharp, making the floor uneven and awkward to negotiate. I resolved to clear a proper path, a ‘flat track’ for myself to walk around. Wherever I stepped on a stone I lifted up the lino and tried to wiggle it out.