A Long Walk Home: One Woman's Story of Kidnap, Hostage, Loss - and Survival (9 page)

At dawn the
muezzin
performed his newly enhanced job of stirring me awake while calling the pious to prayer. Woodsmoke was in the air again; I knew the morning’s fires were already ablaze outside. And suddenly it came to me why this smell was so familiar: I remembered it from my time in Chililabombwe, thirty-five years previously, when fires would be lit in the locality at the same early hour, the woodsmoke then threading its way through the trees and hanging in the air over the arboreal canopy …

Looking up groggily to the plastic ceiling I winced to see I had company. A little colony of insects – mainly cockroaches and bluebottle-like flies – had gathered at the top of my mosquito net, in spite of the efforts I’d made to tuck the mesh tight all around the bed before I slept. The bugs had still found a way to invade, but now they were trapped and entangled by the net. I hadn’t the energy to unpick and expel the intruders; I just turned over, with a shudder, and managed to drift back to sleep awhile, for a couple of hours, until Smiley Boy entered with his customary ‘El-llllo!’

Onto the table left behind from the Negotiator’s visit, Smiley Boy set down another dish of greyish potatoes – two large
tablespoonfuls
, peeled and cubed and boiled. I really hoped this wasn’t going to be my everyday diet. The Boy took away my bowl from the previous night, but also set down a flask of hot water and a packet of loose-leaf tea. I gathered this was so I could make tea for myself; but I’d yet to develop a taste for the Somali version of tea, and couldn’t see myself acquiring one any time soon.

I ate resignedly, knowing I had to take whatever sustenance was offered. As the sun rose some light crept through gaps in the decorative breezeblocks set high up in the wall, creating a lovely pattern that inched gradually down the opposite wall. Barring the
muezzin
’s contributions, this was the only gauge I had of the passage of time.

I slipped outside to use the toilet and saw that Hungry Man – one of that Triumvirate who seemed to be the ‘sergeants’ of the group – was awake and moving about. But the other pirates were asleep, around the compound and, I assumed, inside Rooms 2 and 3 of the terrace that seemed to comprise their ‘mess’. The door of Room 4, which I had taken for Pirate HQ , was resolutely shut.

Back in my room I began my day’s walking, but it wasn’t long before the Negotiator entered, flanked by Vain Man and Fat Man, who adopted his favoured stance, leaning against the wall and glaring at me, sidelong. Another pirate, one of the ‘corporals’, came at the rear, wearing a bright blue vest with yellow piping and celtic printed, incongruously, across the chest. (He walked with a noticeable limp.) The Negotiator took a red mobile phone from his shirt pocket and fiddled with it.

‘OK, we take video. This is proof you are alive. And here is what you must say.’

He handed me a piece of paper on which I could make out a scrawled quartet of statements:
I am Jude Tebbutt. I am British. I am in Somalia. I am being treated well.

He then positioned me in front of the wall, but didn’t seem to like the image he was getting on his screen. He beckoned to Vain Man, who unpegged the curtains hemming the walls – and I saw for the first time that two sets of windows lay behind them, one facing the door, the other on the left-hand wall. A startling sunlight
streamed into the cramped space, though it was diffused just as quickly when Vain Man reinstated the curtain pegs. I was directed to stand by the side window, for lighting purposes. I was wearing my blue-grey-silvery headscarf,
de rigueur
, but Vain Man indicated for me to remove it. The Negotiator nodded.

‘You’re sure? I thought you weren’t meant to see my hair …?’

On this occasion pieties were set aside. They filmed two ‘takes’ of me reading the prepared statement: the first seemed to suffer from bad sound recording. The Negotiator showed me a playback on the little screen, then moved smartly for the door.

I called to his retreating back, ‘So what happens now?’

‘This is gonna be sent so we get money, yeah?’

‘When will you send it?’

‘Soon. And we will start negotiations soon.’

‘How much money will you ask for …?’

But he didn’t favour that with an answer, just swept out, with his entourage. I knew I had to accept I had no control over anything going on beyond the threshold of my small cell – and that would include whatever ransom was being placed on my life. But since money was so clearly all they wanted, it reassured me to think this matter was basically resolvable. We had money: for a long time David had been saving our pooled salaries – for our retirement, so we could travel and enjoy a decent standard of life. And, painful as it would be, he would know how to handle this negotiation. He would be guided, I was certain, by the British Embassy in Kenya, who seemed to me the most likely first recipients of the video.

A cloud in my mind, though, was the thought of the video airing on British television news, and my mum seeing it – seeing me, marooned in these dire straits. Hearing the news of my kidnap from my sister Carol would have been quite sufficiently
traumatic, but visual evidence would only frighten her further. I had to stick to the thought that as long as David got the video – and he could only be waiting for it, in high anxiety – then from here the process could, in theory, run like clockwork.

My thoughts turned back to the task before me – how to get through another day in this room, my drastically reduced universe. But I was feeling upbeat as I walked my circuits.
This won’t be so bad. We’ll have an incredible story to tell at the end of it – a grim one, yes. But we’ll be able to call ourselves survivors.

I walked on what I guessed to be the hour, and for half an hour at a time, up until nightfall. I continued to prise small stones out from under the linoleum, collecting them in a pile in the corner of the room. Soon I had quite a rockery building up there.

My walking regimen could, no doubt, have struck another party as terribly monotonous. But I looked forward keenly to each and every walk, finding it therapeutic. The action calmed me, helped me to feel in control. I didn’t see it as simply ploughing the same furrow ad nauseam. The routine and the order were good for me: twelve paces by nine, twelve paces by nine … I swung my arms and watched my feet as I planted them, each tread exactly the length of a square of linoleum. Walking was rhythmic, meditative: it put me in touch with myself and was remarkably effective at driving any thoughts of the pirates from my mind. In my head, I was walking home. And at the end of each day I was exhausted, so aiding restful sleep.

Still, I wondered too if I could try some slightly more vigorous exercise, without having to get down on the floor with the insect life. Another thought occurred to me: at home I took a Pilates class every Tuesday evening after work. Shouldn’t it be possible
to imitate, however roughly, some of those exercises here? Ordinarily I needed a couple of weighted balls to work with, but when I took a pair of full water bottles out of my ‘Bosaso’ box and hefted them in my hands, they seemed to make an adequate substitute. Ordinarily I did my Pilates lying on a mat but I really didn’t fancy the floor here; so I got onto the bed and tried out my core exercises, neck rolls and so forth. Now and then a pirate looked in through the door and beheld me in disbelief. But I was pleased with my own inventiveness.

With the passing time I realised that I was waiting in anticipation for the
muezzin
’s regular calls, as if there were a hidden connection between us, he my unwitting assistant in the business of establishing a roughly dependable form of timekeeping. By my count his cries rang out five times a day: the first with the rising sun, the second around ‘lunchtime’, the third in the latish afternoon. Not long after that third cry, in the fading of the light, I was delivered a bowl of boiled rice. Like my breakfast, this evening meal was noticeably small. Aside from that surreptitious gift of samosas after my arrival, they were feeding me about as sparsely as they could. Whereas I could see, from my glimpses of life outside in the compound, that my guards were eating pretty well, and more regularly. I had a notion that I should try not to let my thoughts linger on food, lest my hunger grow even stronger.

But I couldn’t help straying now and then. I imagined myself pushing the trolley round the aisles of my local Waitrose, filling it steadily with the makings for delicious meals I could prepare for David and me. With some mental effort I shifted the focus of this little fantasy away from the food itself to the idea of the shopping list – and from that to constructing in my head a precise three-dimensional model of the supermarket as I made
my imaginary tour. It didn’t do me nearly as much good as a bacon sandwich would have done. But it passed the time.

The penultimate
muezzin
call of the day, at twilight, was the most welcome to me – it signalled that my day was nearly done. There was one more walk to do, but I had a special motivation: there was a lamp hanging in the covered walkway, powered by the portable generator, but it snapped off not too long after nightfall, casting us into pitch darkness, and I wanted to be in bed by the time it did that.

As I approached the end of my last walk there was a satisfaction in feeling so wearied that I was ready to fall onto the bed. I requested and was granted a last toilet visit – not from any great need so much as to take a moment to gaze up at the night sky and the stars. It comforted me to know that David, Ollie, my family, were out there somewhere, under the same vast canopy, and with luck I would be back with them soon.

The stifling heat of the day meant that my skin was continually drenched in sweat. But I quickly established that the provision of water for washing was a system that required punctual observance on my part. I was issued with an empty plastic petrol container that would be filled for me each morning, at my request, from a pump outside the compound. But I had to stick my head out of the door, shake the can and attract attention. Then I would have to set the can down, as the pirates would not take it from my hands. And then I would wait for the order to be filled, rarely with any special haste.

But thus, come the evening, I had water and I could disrobe and wash, cleanse myself as best as I could. It was a matter of dignity, and for this sliver of the day I had to have some privacy, some respect shown to a fundamental need. By tone of voice and gesticulation I managed to make it clear to the pirates that they
shouldn’t enter my room after dark. ‘I wash – you no come in! You see naked woman if you do!’ The door stayed open, only the curtain hung, but I’d succeeded in getting my message over: no one wandered in. Still I felt wary, vulnerable.

I peeled off my clothes, draped them over the back of a plastic chair – some additional cover from prying eyes – and sat down. Then I poured cold water from the oil canister into a big wide green bowl they had given me, and I washed my feet and body in that. I used just a little precious soap, which I didn’t want to waste. There was a limit to how well I could tend to myself, of course. My body was scored all over with scrapes and scratches, spots and blood blisters. I was a mess, frankly. But I refused to resign myself to that. With my washing complete, I understood that come the morning the offending water would – in accordance with the Islamic strictures of these pirates – have to be disposed of down the toilet. (The green bowl was too wide and heavy for me to manoeuvre out through the door, and so I decanted the water into a third receptacle I had been given – a black plastic bucket – and conveyed it that way.)

The light outside snapped off but within a minute I was in bed with the sheet pulled up to my chin. I talked to myself a little, mantra-like:
Well done today, you got through another one. Tomorrow, same again. Remember, this is temporary, not for ever, it won’t be long till you’re out of here. David and Ollie are waiting.

In the dark I wasn’t entirely alone, of course. And I hadn’t long to wait before I felt the first little insect scuttling across my hands or my face. I wondered about sleeping with my arms outside the sheet, so that I could bat them away. But on the whole it seemed better to get myself inured to their presence. I could manage – as long as there were no snakes.

I had my routine in place and I was resigned to the communications over my release taking a few days, maybe a week or so. In the time left over I tried to be vigilant and collect some workable understanding of my surroundings and my captors. Every visit to the loo, every glance around the compound, was a sort of intelligence-gathering. I tried to log the faces of the various pirates and sort out in my head who was who: who was ‘friendly’, and who not. Any sort of rapport seemed worth encouraging.
You do this sort of thing all the time
, I told myself,
only with very difficult psychiatric patients. Here you’ve got less chance of finding common ground. You know nothing of their culture beyond their devotion to prayer. But if you keep looking you’ll find something to work with …

The Triumvirate conversed together, hugged and laughed and play-fought with each other, and, most importantly, seemed to dispense orders (as well as cigarettes) to the younger ‘runarounds’, who would come up to them and take instruction. They clearly enjoyed the confidence of Fat Man and the Negotiator. So my view was that I had better show respect to them.

Hungry Man would smile at me and give a thumbs-up, which I mimicked, since I could do nothing else. Kufiya Man also appeared quietly pleasant. When I saw him bare-headed I realised that his scant hair was in tufts and patches, alopecia-like, which loaned him a vulnerable air. But the third member of the Triumvirate, Vain Man, was at all times aloof and vaguely surly.

Marvin popped his head round my door with some frequency, his expression amiable, which was vaguely reassuring. Another pirate I noticed was short, solidly built, quiet and something of a loner. I never saw him without a cigarette in his mouth, be it morning or night, and so I dubbed him Chain-Smoker. I could
rely on him, though, to show me a friendly face. There was one, though, who was large and muscular, dark-haired, with a small nose, somewhat Caucasian features and a coffee-coloured complexion, pockmarked with acne scars across his cheeks. He gave off a tough, rugged air, as if seasoned in piracy, and he carried a heavy machine-gun with a tripod fixing. Unlike with some of the more nervy young runarounds, I was quite convinced this man could kill somebody. He was a scary character.