A Long Walk Home: One Woman's Story of Kidnap, Hostage, Loss - and Survival (25 page)

The Friday of that week, 16 March, the Negotiator called on me once again, becoming, by his own standards, a regular visitor. Again he was flanked by all of my guards plus a couple of new arrivals: the Leader, Kaalim, Chair Man, Tall Man, Bambi, Chain-Smoker. They all appeared outwardly cheerful.

‘I need to take another video of you,’ the Negotiator said, as if the previous video of six months ago, added to this one, made videos too seem a frequent occurrence.

‘What for?’ I asked warily.

‘For the people who gonna take you to airport.’

‘OK …’ I said. ‘Are
you
going to be coming to the airport?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, why the video then? If you’re there, you could tell whoever they are that I am who I am.’

But he was set in his own logic, for better or worse. So I took my headscarf off, and he wrote down what I was to say on a piece of paper and gave it to me. I noticed that his spelling was poor. There were eight questions that he wanted me to answer.

‘When you speak,’ he instructed, ‘you do not say that I have told you these questions. They must not know.’

I nodded. As before, I was filmed against the wall, with its lime-green-banded curtains patterned with tulips. The
atmosphere
was nearly jovial.
Maybe this is it,
I thought.
Maybe I am going?

I recited the set text: ‘I am Jude Tebbutt. I have been well looked after, I have been fed. I’ve not been tortured. I have had medical treatment. I have slept well. I have not been harmed. I’ve had water.’

Satisfied, the Negotiator pocketed his camera phone and left. Ali, who had been sitting down on the mattress where he usually slept, got to his feet and lingered.

‘You go soon,’ he said.

‘I hope so,’ I replied, suddenly a little light-headed.

Kaalim and the Leader were left in the room with me. They said something I couldn’t understand, then they both did a little jig of delight. I copied them. We all seemed to find that funny. Their spirits were notably elevated.
Could it be,
I wondered,
that you all think you’ve got your big pay day coming?

I vowed to myself to stay wary, wait for what would be to be. I’d been told several times before about my imminent release, only for it to have turned out as nothing but a tactic for keeping me under control. But over that weekend, through Saturday, 17 March, and then Sunday, the atmosphere in the compound changed utterly.

A couple of days before I had watched Jamal and Gerwaine clean out the African House, fastidiously. In the morning they swept it out, then sprinkled water to keep the dust down. Then they got down to some work on the interior. From under my curtain I glimpsed their activity. The contents of the house were shifted
out into the yard, bits of matting and a couple of oil drums. Then they appeared to be working with a lot of empty, white, woven rice sacks, cut open around the seams and stretched taut, which they were fixing around the house’s inner walls. It was beyond me why they had turned so house proud.

But on Saturday, around 1 p.m., just after consumption of the lunch-hour delivery of
khat
, Ali came in to me, smiling.

‘You come now.’

‘I’m not going anywhere until you tell me where I’m going.’

‘The men want you come into house? Cool. Too hot for you here.’

I didn’t waste another moment disputing that. I grabbed my water bottle, my book, pen, radio and fag-packet game, and stuffed them all in a black bag. Ali took up my mattress and led me across the compound.

Inside the African House the first thing I noticed was the light – my eyes needed some moments to adjust – and the cool breeze at my neck, so different to my gloomy sauna-like pit.

Jamal, Kaalim, Chain-Smoker and Bambi were sitting around, as was Scary Man, a less inviting presence. The big tripod gun was on the floor at his side, part covered by his jacket, but seeing me he pulled his jacket away – simply, I assumed, to unnerve me.

Undeterred, I lay down on my mattress with my water and radio, staring up at the ceiling, admiring the remarkable engineering of the thatching work, noting the proliferation of all those split rice sacks, stamped in places with the words
SORGHUM, US AID,
and
NOT TO BE EXCHANGED.

Here and there black plastic bags hung heavily from the natural ‘hooks’ of branches – my old trick, and I knew, too, that there were clothes inside the bags. I had seen Bambi and
Chain-Smoker
take delivery of their laundry, fold the clothing carefully
and then stuff it into binbags. Seeing the bags drooping pendulously, I found myself thinking of the habits of the weaver bird, which makes its nest by hanging upside-down and
entwining
very fine grasses and twigs into a nest suspended from a branch, bulbous and teardrop-like. These bags looked like the handiwork of some monstrous weaver bird. Chuckling inwardly, I felt a rare, and not quite explicable, sense of peace.

The pirates were playing a game, like draughts without a board, a sort of grid in the sand formed with black and white stones, the winner being whoever captured most stones. They seemed largely oblivious to me, lulled into torpor by their
khat.

So I got out my fag-packet game and, kneeling on my
mattress
, started playing that. Afghanistan–Kabul, Albania–Tirana … Shortly, though, Gerwaine, a non-partaker of
khat
, came in and sat himself down by my mattress watching me. Abruptly he picked up a ticket and asked me, ‘What?’

‘London,’ I said, and he parroted ‘London’ at me.

‘Yes, very good,’ I said. He began to pick up more tickets and make the same enquiry, one by one. I wasn’t hugely in the mood to accommodate him: I wanted to play my game, not his. But there seemed no escape, and so we went round the bloody world from the floor of the African House. It didn’t escape my notice, as Gerwaine was handling my tickets, that I had a good reason to make sure my game came with me to freedom, impregnated as it now was with pirate fingerprints.

The others went on chewing, laughing, chatting, agreeably enough. Then I realised Ali was looking at me.

‘What is it?’ I asked.

‘My friend here’ – Ali jerked a thumb at Scary Man – ‘his grandmother was English, and he wants English wife.’

‘Oh, does he? Where’s he going to get one of them from?’

‘He looking for wife, he look at you.’

I looked Scary Man straight in the eye.
‘Maya
[No].’ But it was as if my skin had started crawling.

I made a request to Ali that I be allowed to go back, despite this oasis of cool in the boiling heat. ‘Don’t like being here,’ I said.

Ali said something to Scary Man who laughed, but clambered to his feet and left, staring at me all the way out. The others followed him outside, evidently to smoke and brew up some tea. I left them to it. But after a while I kneeled up and peered into the yard: no one was in sight. I stood, at the side of the door, and looked again: still no one. I assumed they had gone into the room next to mine. Experimentally I stepped out and walked around the perimeter of the yard, savouring the breeze. There was little to the fencing of this place that could have prevented me from slinking away there and then, though I would have had to pass within sight of the pirates’ doorway. But the fencing was not the prison, of course. The village was the prison. Somalia was a prison. I had nowhere to go. But what I did have was a newly rising hope.

On Sunday morning the Negotiator turned up in my room once again, albeit fleetingly, but with a triumphant look in his eye.

‘Twenty-one, twenty-one!’ he shouted.

I couldn’t be sure what to make of this but I had a good idea. Today was 18 March. Could release be just seventy-two hours away? The optimistic feeling was enhanced, somehow, when Amina’s daughter then appeared, bringing with her a bottle of perfume that she proffered to me as a gift. It did seem rather more like a kind of going-away present than a token towards making my prison (and my person) a touch more fragrant.

Then, around 1 p.m., I was once more invited by Ali into the African House.
They’re so kind
… I thought for a fleeting moment, and then had to catch myself.

Before he escorted me across the yard Ali asked for my book and pen, and I watched as he carefully inscribed a phone number and email address on the page.

‘When you go home?’ he said. ‘Please, ring me, text me: “Blue room hotel”.’ Then I know you’re home.’ I nodded, having no such intention, struck more by Ali’s seeming conviction that I would soon be on my way.

In the African House spirits remained high among my guards: they were smiley and thumbs-up, even those ordinarily as
sour-faced
as Kaalim and Chair Man. ‘You go, sleep at home soon,’ said Ali, making swooping aeroplane gestures as Amina had when semaphoring her wish to pair off her daughter with Ollie.

‘I go and you go?’ I asked Ali. ‘You see your wife, your son?’

He nodded keenly.

‘Have you planned how you’re going to get back home?’

‘Big Man give me money,’ he said, casually. ‘Everyone get.’

‘Everyone gets paid for their part in keeping me here?’

He nodded. I wasn’t surprised.

‘And what do you think you’ll do when you get home?’

‘I fish. My wife cook me good food. Not like this food.’

I was with him on that score. But there was something else I was curious about.

‘What if these pirates came and got you again? If they wanted you to help them again, with another hostage?’

‘No, no,’ he said resolutely. ‘They kill me, they
kill
me.’

He wasn’t making himself wholly clear but what I sensed he meant was that he would rather die than be conscripted into service again. It was another profession of his aversion to their
cause, and of some kind of solidarity with me. Even now, after six months of tenuous rapport and so many conversations with this man, I wasn’t sure what to make of him. And yet, still, I preferred to believe that he really wasn’t ‘one of them’.

‘When you see Ollie?’ he said, smiling. ‘You say hello from Ali.’

I decided to let that one pass with diplomatic silence. And yet he persisted.

‘I like to see London. If I come to London, you take me out?’

‘I don’t think so’ was the reply I settled on, after a moment of careful consideration.

And yet, whether it was demob happiness or a genuine belief on their parts that they had things to look forward to, things with which I could help them – they carried on pressing this line. When I was back in my room Ali entered with Gerwaine, who looked a little sheepish.

‘This man,’ said Ali, ‘he ask, do you think he is bad person?’

Again I had to ponder:
Should I be honest here?

‘I don’t know him, as a person. But what he’s done is very bad. It’s ruined my life, ruined my son’s life.’

Ali relayed this and there seemed to be a little reconsideration between the two, before he said, ‘If Gerwaine come to London, would you say hello?’

‘No,’ I said, feeling my patience stretched. ‘I would ignore him. You understand “ignore”?’

‘So you no say hello …?’

‘That’s right. No hello. When I leave here, I leave. I try to forget you all, forget this – yes?’

I didn’t think I could be clearer, or wish for anything more devoutly. That I was expected to mind their feelings, much less think well of them, was bizarre to the point of surreal, and I
might have been angrier were it not such patent foolishness on their part.

For the first time since my ordeal had begun, events seemed to be moving apace with my hopes, indeed my mounting
anticipation
. On Monday morning the Negotiator came and told me I would talk to Ollie today. I had endured three months without a call. This one seemed to promise more than ever before.

The moment I heard Ollie’s voice I detected a tension there, a clenched quality that was new and distinct.

‘Mum, we’ve been told you’re going to be released tomorrow, Tuesday. What have they told you?’

‘All I’ve heard so far is “Twenty-one”, which is Wednesday.’

‘OK, right. But listen, Mum, if it doesn’t happen, we’re still working to get you out. Stay focused. It’s just a matter of time …’

‘Don’t worry,’ I found myself wanting to reassure Ollie. ‘We’ll get through it together.’

That night I was sitting on the mattress doing word games by torchlight when Ali rushed into the room, in a panic, frantic – most uncharacteristically.

‘Telephone number, email I give you? Gerwaine going to look at your books. He take them away!’

My first thought was of concern for all that I’d written in my books, whether I would be exposed, and the material confiscated. But I could see Ali’s urgency, and it had to be dealt with. I found what he had written, ripped out the offending page and gave it to him, whereupon he calmed down. But the state he’d got
himself
into was further proof to me that things were afoot.

When he was gone I knew I had to take care of my own business. The physical descriptions I’d written of the pirates, the
sketches I’d made of the various compounds where I’d been held – I couldn’t let Gerwaine or anyone else see them, couldn’t risk maybe jeopardising my release. So I carefully tore the pages in question, and also their equivalent pages, so as to leave no
suspiciously
frayed edges. But I didn’t intend to lose this material down the privy. I was determined to spirit it out with me somehow: I would have to secrete it somewhere. A great notion occurred: the pirates would surely have no interest in the cellophane-wrapped packet of tissues they issued me with. So I opened the tissues, wrapped the folded pages within a single tissue, and tucked my prize carefully back inside the packet.

The morning brought another call with Ollie.

‘Mum, we’ve been told you’ll be released tomorrow. Now I need you to write something down …’

I hastened to get my book and pen.

‘OK, now, tomorrow you’re going to be taken to an airport, and a plane is coming to get you there – a small plane, and on it is a man who will tell you his name is Jack. You can trust this man, Mum. Get in the plane with him, and he will bring you to me in Nairobi.’