A Long Walk Home: One Woman's Story of Kidnap, Hostage, Loss - and Survival (24 page)

In the daytime pirates would occasionally try to show me what they had been enjoying on their devices, imagining perhaps that I felt I was missing out on the fun and might be cheered up. Abdullah treated me to one video of an undulating belly dancer – evidence, maybe, of a bit of a roving eye on his part. Ali shared with me a short film of a horrendous multi-car motorway
pileup
, shot from behind the wheel of one vehicle, which I dearly hoped was some sort of staged stunt. ‘You’re weird,’ I told him plainly. ‘That’s really horrible. I don’t want to see it.’ My reaction seemed quite amusing to him.

I was glad of any distraction or novelty, yes, but it struck me as somehow ironic that this austere-looking, pious Somali’s tastes in entertainment ran to much the same kind of sex-and-violence mix as the average Westerner’s.

One day I did, out of the blue, see something that rather delighted me. As I sat disconsolately gazing out into the yard I heard what sounded very much like a donkey’s distinctive, mournful bray. I decided to investigate. I stuck my head right out of the curtain and shouted ‘
Musqusha!
’ until I attracted attention and permission. As soon as I stepped out I was met by the sight of a great big camel’s head above the side of the thatched fence. Chair Man was trying to shoo the beast away by shouts and claps of his hands. But the camel only munched slowly on the leaves of the branches, its eyes ponderous and unmoved under its big dark lashes. I looked at Chair Man, he looked at me, and we both smiled. For both of us, perhaps, the visitor made for a nice distraction from monotony.

This stint in Horrible House had lasted six exceptionally miserable days, into the new month of February 2012, when I was awakened in the night and once more got the silent order to pack up and get moving. Processing this mentally, I wondered if ‘the heat’ of the Jessica Buchanan rescue was felt to have receded, or whether the austerity drive was about to enter another and more excruciating phase. But could anything be more miserly and deprived than Horrible House?

We drove, in fact, to Tall Man’s House – a strange sort of déjà vu, enhanced when, once again, the pirates struggled at the gate to get it open, since it was locked from the inside. A hurried phone call was made to wake the sleeper within. Tall Man came
out, unlocked, and admitted us. Again I raised my eyebrows at the slipshodness of it all.
What a bunch
, I thought. And yet they had succeeded in holding me for one hundred and forty-five days now. How many more?

The one sight I genuinely looked forward to seeing within Tall Man’s compound was the tree where the blue bird had perched. Bizarrely – and yet with a kind of inevitability – the tree had gone: evidently uprooted and carted away. I didn’t want to believe this had been done to spite me, somehow. But when I asked Ali about it, he looked as if the very idea of a tree in that spot was news to him. Whether he was playing dumb, or really hadn’t noticed, it wasn’t worth pursuing.

Like the last time I had made the same move from Horrible House to Tall Man’s House, I felt a small but important benefit. The Leader came into my room on the first morning and made a gesture of rubbing his stomach.

‘Better now?’

I nodded. This man’s version of solicitude was, as ever, very strange to me. I was ‘better’ than I had been a week ago, but my relative decline over the space of a month remained deeply worrying to me. I now decided I had the energy and strength only to walk in the mornings, and a little in the evening: I would rest from 1 p.m. until 6 p.m., then walk again at 6 p.m. and at 8 p.m. My intention was to start my evening washing routine a shade sooner, and perhaps to be in bed under the sheet a bit earlier too.

I was in a place where I could cope. The precious goal of
freedom
still lay ahead. I believed I was walking towards it still – to home, to Ollie, to my family. But gauging the distance to go was becoming a dangerously opaque business. I needed structure, needed to close up the pores of each day with occupations, because too many gaps in my mind left room for detour to dark
places where I didn’t want to go. Occasionally that happened anyway. With my usual disciplines I had to drag myself back on track.

The radio continued to offer me certain markers, things to aim for. On
The Strand
I heard about a film I liked the sound of, an Iranian work called
A Separation
. Increasing attention was being paid to the London Olympics in the build-up to the July opening, and I kept telling myself that if I was home to see the Games then I would count it a blessing.

And then, irony of ironies, I found myself listening to a World Service report on the state of Somalia, occasioned by the announcement of a special conference to be held in London on 23 February, hosted by David Cameron and the UK Foreign Office, with high-ranking attendees from around the globe.

I heard that Foreign Secretary William Hague had described Somalia, after twenty years of violence and war, as ‘the world’s worst failed state’, an epically bleak and unenviable distinction. And the programme recited the litany of crisis conditions besetting Somalia: people in poverty, swaths of the country controlled by extremists, prospering pockets of criminality and terrorism. The idea behind the conference appeared to be about making a big commitment to encouraging political progress, enhanced security, and proper representative government in Somalia, and by more than just the usual tool of international humanitarian aid. All the wise heads appeared to agree that tackling piracy, a special symptom of Somalia’s malaise, was a major issue.

The show rehearsed an explanation, if not a justification, for the upsurge in Somali piracy: how, after the collapse of governance
in 1992, its coastline became a plundering zone for big foreign fishing trawlers chasing tuna, lobster, shark and shrimp – a kind of predation that dealt a massive blow to the staple of the local economy. Some angry Somali fishermen took to launching defensive sorties against these trawlers. Soon, they realised that to board a foreign ship and hold its crew hostage could yield a ransom. The idea caught fire, and now the navies of many foreign nations patrolled the coast of Somalia, while their commercial trawlers employed armed guards. It seemed clear that this new vigilance had helped to turn the pirates’ focus towards ‘softer targets’ – foreign tourists, like David and me.

Obviously I wasn’t in a position to verify any of this analysis. But I listened avidly. I had learned for sure that Somalia was not a land of opportunity, and that kidnapping had become a
disturbingly
, corruptively ‘normal’ form of business.

One contributor, an expert on hostage situations, expressed the view that Somali pirates treated their hostages relatively well, keeping them in reasonable health and not under threat, so they could be exchanged safely. He also volunteered that the ‘average’ duration of captivity for a hostage in Somalia was roughly eight months – though an exception was the case of Paul and Rachel Chandler, the British couple taken from their sailing boat off the Seychelles in October 2009, who were kept for more than a year.

Hearing these statistics I did some sums in my head. I had survived five months now: another three felt ‘do-able’. But any longer than that? Another seven, making a year, felt like agony. How would I get through it?
You get through a year like you get through a day,
I told myself.
You reason it out into
manageable
chunks, pieces of time. You’ve done five months. Twice five is ten …

It was a good job that I remained strong in mind. In body I was permanently tired and sluggish, and my shrunken stomach ached constantly from hunger. After months of a calcium-free diet I worried, too, about the state of my teeth, and had taken to a primitive form of flossing using a thorn from one of the shrubs that formed the compound fence – in this I was only emulating what I saw the pirates doing daily. But my efforts at ritual hygiene couldn’t gloss over my thoroughly dilapidated state. I could feel the bones under my skin, my pelvis and ribs
disturbingly
skeletal to me. I wanted to keep walking home, to remember Ollie’s exhortations and be energised by them. But I knew my energies had to be conserved too – or else someone would have to carry or drag me on the last of the way.

One morning the Beautiful Woman delivered food and water to Tall Man’s House. I was surprised to see her, and surprised twice over since she was wearing the same blue-pink-silver
jilbab
as me. I pointed at her, she at me, and I gave her a thumbs-up. Evidently we shared the same brilliant taste. And we laughed – just as if we had turned up at a cocktail reception both wearing the same dress.

But it was a short-lived sort of laughter. Harsh, intense heat had begun to reassert itself in the days of mid-February, and I was made excruciatingly conscious yet again of how unclean and ill-smelling I was, and how rank my clothing. I had been wearing this dress for months and I could hardly bear it. I was suffering from prickly heat, and if I rubbed my fingers at the knuckles the skin just peeled away with a sickening ease. There was another short laugh to be had there: for such a thorough and effective exfoliation, I could imagine Western women spending a hundred pounds a go at some fancy hotel spa.

But I complained to my guards daily, Ali in particular. One afternoon he came to my room with Gerwaine and I vented my woes freely on them both.

‘When Somali women go home, do they keep the full
hijab
gear on all of the time, for all seasons?’

‘No, no,’ Ali said. ‘They have other. Cooler.’

‘Well, I need “cooler” too. If I’m going to be stuck in this room for March, April, the really hot months … it’s not possible, there’s no air.’

Gerwaine shook his head most adamantly. ‘No, no. You
go
March. March you not here.’

I wondered how he’d arrived at that particular view on my prospects for freedom. But going by past experience I certainly couldn’t take it at face value – only as an excuse not to lift a finger in my direction. Some relief arrived, though, that very afternoon. Amina’s daughter came to me bearing a carefully folded garment, and when I shook it out I saw that it was a summer dress,
sleeveless
with straps, low at the back and the neck – but torn and pocked with holes, in spite of how beautifully it had been presented. Still, by god, I was glad of it. My dignity was long gone out of the window, so I had no qualms about donning such a ragged article of clothing. I had to cover my hair just as always, but wearing this threadbare dress did bring palpable respite from the worst heat of the day.

Nights in Tall Man’s House threw up oddly disconcerting moments, even after all the time I’d spent getting habituated. Increasingly in the daytime I was allowed to have the door open, and the curtain draped over the top, so I didn’t need to resort to my torch. But once darkness fell … It was something to do with
the evening breeze, which stirred the curtain over the doorway as I hobbled around the space, and with the gloom, unleavened by any kind of natural light, and also the muted quality of my hearing, shorn of my usual aids. But somehow it always seemed to me that as the curtain was blown lightly into the room, then a pirate would emerge from behind it, shoeless and silent, like an apparition – and quite often directly in front of me. I felt myself acquiring a new and deeply unwelcome nervous tic: even if I was just sitting on the bed, reading, I looked up with a start whenever the wind blew.

One day the Leader was an unexpected visitor to Tall Man’s House. I had the curtain hitched up and was peering out of the doorway when I saw him be admitted through the gate,
whereupon
he hastened from view and into the African House.
Although
I wondered what had occasioned this house call, I saw no more of him in the daylight hours.

Later that evening I was sitting on my bed in the darkness, writing in my book by the light of my torch, when I sensed that the curtain had stirred. I looked up sharply, to see the Leader framed in the doorway. Startled, I got up and off the bed at once. He stood and stared at me, unnervingly. In breach of my usual practice of meeting his eye I felt myself backing away from him, wary. He was empty-handed. So what on earth was on his mind? What had he come for?

He came towards me, cupped both my hands between his big plate-like palms, and shook them gently. As he did so, he bowed his head. The moment endured – then he turned away and left me alone again.

In the aftermath of this encounter I nearly had to ask myself if I had dreamt it, so strange and perplexing was the effect it left behind. But the touch of his hands had been real, whatever the
meaning. My hunch – it was nothing more – was that he knew I knew what he had done in the early hours of 11 September, and, in that light, his gesture towards me had a look of contrition about it.

The operation of guarding me, which still seemed subject to a kind of economy drive, began to seem as casual as it was
parsimonious
. There were never more than four men in the
compound
, the personnel rotating every five days or so. But as February wore on I started to sense a slightly lackadaisical air among them. Ali had seemed at first to be very reliant on visits from Abdullah, and they would sit and chat and twiddle their phones before Abdullah slouched off, back, I assumed, in the direction of the Big House. But then, steadily, Ali seemed to become more integrated with the other pirates, and would sit and play dominoes with them as he’d never done before.

Ali busied into my room one evening holding his phone aloft, all smiles, and for a moment I wondered if there was a call for me, until he declared, ‘My son! My son on the phone!’

‘That’s nice,’ I murmured, wishing that
my
son was on the phone. But he pressed the handset on me, and I heard his little three-year-old boy chirruping away.

I was shown a touch more friendliness from unexpected quarters. One evening around 7.30 p.m. I was returning from a toilet visit, past the stoop where the pirates played their
dominoes
and smoked their tobacco, when Kaalim beckoned me to sit down with them. I couldn’t guess why he had abruptly decided to ‘play nice’ but I accepted the offer, and savoured the cool breeze while I could. I didn’t stick around, not wanting to miss my 8 p.m. walk. This smallest of gestures, though, got me
wondering
whether something wasn’t afoot, something to improve the mood even of the cranky, quick-tempered Kaalim.

It was no accident, I knew, that I arrived at a new resolution about how to spend my writing time alone with my book and pen. I had known in myself for some time that, once I got out of this place, I wanted to be interviewed, debriefed, about the whole ordeal. And I wanted to give as accurate an account as possible of the pirates and their safe houses: an account that could be of use, a dependable record, in a court of law, if these men were ever brought to justice. For months I had been applying my near-enough photographic memory to my
surroundings
and circumstances; even so, I was frightened I might forget. And I didn’t want to miss one thing. So I began to write detailed physical descriptions of the houses where I had been held, and of the pirates. It was certainly a project, something to occupy me, conducted under whatever veil of secrecy I could maintain.

My senses were acute, however much the rest of me had been systematically degraded. And so I smelled the Negotiator before I saw him, when he paid his first visit to me beyond the walls of the Big House – the first, at least to my knowledge. He entered my room with the full reduced cohort of pirates at his back, took one look at me, pointed seemingly at what I was wearing and then said something to the men.

‘You very thin,’ he finally addressed me. I realised he had been gesturing towards my bony arms.

‘I know,’ I replied. ‘That’s because I’m not eating properly.’

The point seemed to be clear to him, as if it had been below his radar until now. He swept out again before I had the chance
to question him, however much in vain, about the current state of negotiations.

That evening I thought I could make out a double
tablespoon’s
worth of rice in my dish. In the morning, likewise, I seemed to have been served twice as much greyish potato. I wondered if they hadn’t made the decision to ‘feed me up’ a bit, albeit by the most meagre measure imaginable. But did I dare to think that wheels were turning, for all that I remained in the dark?