Hostage Three (8 page)

— Now, said Ahmed, you take me safe with ten thousand dollar.

— Bring it to you? asked my dad.

— No. You take me.

He gestured with his AK-47 for Dad to go out of the door in front of him. Dad looked at all of us, shrugged and led the way. Ahmed followed him out.

When they had gone, Farouz looked over at Tony. Anger flashed on Farouz's face and he went over to the other pirate, the scary one who was chewing – who had bothered to open his eyes at least since Farouz had arrived. Farouz started shouting at him. I heard the word biyo repeated several times.

The dead-eyed pirate with the red bandanna sighed, got up and left the room. Farouz tapped his foot impatiently. A minute later, the other man came back with a couple of bottles of water. He gave one to Tony and put the others on the glass coffee table, before sitting down again.

— Thank you, said Tony.

— You are welcome, said Farouz. You should have had it sooner, he added, with a glance at the other man, who sneered back at him.

I noticed that. Him being kind, I mean. I was also considering, in some distant part of my mind, the way the other pirate had curled his lip at Farouz, thinking that if the pirates ended up fighting each other, that could be good for us. It's the fact that I was able to think about things like this, strategically, that tells you I was in shock, I guess.

I was in shock, but also hyper-aware. The walls seemed to be pulsing, alive. I was very conscious of the details of everything – the brush strokes on the generic English countryside watercolour on the wall, the flecks in the cream carpet. It was as if someone had suspended the whole room under water, and it acted like a lens, that water, magnifying everything, and at the same time it made the sounds that reached me echoey and far away.

— How long are you going to keep us in here? asked the stepmother.

Farouz looked surprised.

— In this room? I don't know. An hour? We are only searching the boat. Then you are free to do as you wish.

— We can go where we want? asked the stepmother.

— Why not? There are guards everywhere, so you can't escape, but you can move around. You all sleep together in this room, though. OK?

— OK, said Tony, who obviously wanted to show some kind of authority, not that Farouz could care less about that, judging by his expression.

No one said anything for quite a while after that. Finally, Ahmed came back in, Dad behind him. Ahmed was carrying wads of banknotes, and smiling. He threw one of them to Farouz and laughed. Then he jerked his thumb for Farouz and the other guy to head out.

_______, Dead Eyes said in his language, which was all harsh throat sounds and squelchy Ls, and sounded like the person speaking was trying to swallow every second letter as if it were food. Then he laughed long and hard, and left the room.

— What was that? said the stepmother. What did he say?

— Nothing, said Farouz.

And I thought, he's the one with the gun – he doesn't even have to bother with lying.

For all that, though
, nothing too scary happened to begin with. True to his word, Farouz let us leave the cinema room later that afternoon.

We went out and on to the rear deck – I think we were all heading towards sunlight without realising it. Seeing the changes that had already taken place on the yacht was weird. One of the pirates was wearing my Superdry hoodie. All of them had on new clothes of some kind – jeans, trainers, even a raincoat. One of them was wearing a parka that the stepmother had bought for Patagonia, which was where we were originally meant to be in six months' time. Somehow, seeing a pirate strutting around a luxury yacht in a parka in thirty-five degree heat made all of them seem a little less intimidating because it was so ridiculous.

Then I remembered the smartphone and the video, and I stopped feeling amused.

It was easier now to get a sense of the numbers. In addition to Ahmed, Farouz and Dead Eyes, we passed two guards in the corridor on the way out to the rear deck. There were three others out on deck by the diving platform, and I guessed more at the front of the yacht. So somewhere around ten pirates, at least, for six of us hostages. No wonder they weren't worried about us escaping.

Men came in and out of the interior of the yacht. All of them, apart from Farouz, were bearded. All of them carried machine guns, apart from Farouz, who had his pistol on that piece of string, and another man, skinny, who carried the bazooka or rocket launcher or whatever it was. The thing looked heavy, but he carried it easily, despite his small frame. As well as guns, the men also had random items. One came out with a laptop – my laptop, I think – which he threw into one of the two little wooden boats. These were tied to the diving platform, to the eyelets where Tony had secured the knotted ropes that were meant to choke the pirates' outboards.

It seemed like a hundred years ago that I'd watched Tony tie those ropes. Now, in their place, the little boats bobbed in our wake, which was gentle at the moment since the engine was off. It was unbelievably hot with only the sail up and no engines running. The heat was like something heavy you wear – a forced embrace, stifling, a fur coat in the height of summer. It pushed at you, not a temperature, but a pressure.

— Excuse me, said Dad. We need water.

One of the pirates looked at him blankly.

— Biyo, I said, pointing to us. Biyo.

Dad looked at me, surprised. But the pirate nodded. He went inside and came back five minutes later with a six-pack of mineral-water bottles, which he set down in front of us, and, bizarrely, my hair straighteners, which went into the little boat. What he thought he was going to do with them, I don't know. Maybe he didn't know what they were for. He was wearing my beige French Connection trench coat, so I guess anything is possible.

Above us, the sun continued to shine. I thought that was incredible, impossible – that simple things like that should carry on being, carry on unfolding, as if nothing had happened. As if we weren't prisoners on our own yacht.

— That's my bloody Prada jumper, said the stepmother, as another guard – or was it one we'd seen before? – walked past.

— Darling, you have to try to . . .

I wasn't really listening to them. I was looking at Dead Eyes, who had just come outside. He spat a black gobbet of khat on to the deck, rolled his head on his shoulders with an audible
crick-crack
of bone against bone. But that wasn't what caught my attention.

He was wearing my watch. My vintage Chanel watch that my mom gave me.

I stood there, and I guess I must have blanched – I mean, my distress must have been obvious – because Dad frowned, then walked over and touched my elbow.

— What is it? he said.

I pointed to the watch.

— It's . . .

But my voice caught, and I couldn't finish. Dad followed my finger, though, and saw the watch. I guess he hadn't completely forgotten about Mom because he tensed, and I felt his fingers grip my arm.

— I see, he said in his I'm-going-to-sort-this-out voice.

— No, Dad, it's OK. I don't –

— Ahmed!

Ahmed had come out on to the rear deck, a cigarette between his lips. He turned to look at Dad.

— Yes?

Dad walked over to where Ahmed stood and spoke to him for a while, his voice low. I thought, oh god, we're all going to die. But I was strangely calm about that, probably because, since the Event, a hidden part of me had secretly wanted to die.

I waited, my mind blank.

But nothing happened. Ahmed didn't even raise his voice or anything.

Then Ahmed faced the other pirates.

— No more steal, he said. We give back. Now. He repeated it in his own language then, I think.

He grabbed the arm of the man passing him, who had the stepmother's pink iPod in his hand. Reluctantly, the pirate handed over the iPod and Ahmed presented it to Dad, sort of solemnly.

— Here, he said.

— Ah, thank you, said Dad.

— Of course. We guests. We not steal no more.

This is the strange effect my dad has on people: he can sometimes charm them into doing what he wants. He chooses the right words, uses this special tone. I guess that's how he ended up so successful, because he pretty much spends his life asking people to give him their money, and counting on the fact that they will.

A sort of pained look crossed Dad's face.

— My daughter . . . he said. She will be safe?

Ahmed actually looked offended.

— We not touch, he said.

— Because if anything happened to her . . .

— We not touch! Ahmed waved a hand angrily to encompass the yacht. This boat, worth nothing. You, worth much. All of you. So we not touch, OK?

— OK, OK, said Dad.

— Girl is precious, said Ahmed. We need her safe to get money.

— Right, said Dad. She's precious to me, too. So that's good. He smiled at Ahmed, used that magic again, and suddenly the two of them were not friends, but something understood. Colleagues.

I smiled at Dad, then. I was proud of him, which was a rare thing.

Then I turned to look for Dead Eyes, to get my watch back, and he was gone.

Soon after we were boarded
, the first supplies and reinforcements arrived. We heard the commotion and went outside. It was a relief to be out of the cinema room. It was starting to smell of sweat and was always hot and close, and even though you couldn't see steam rising from all the bodies in there, I couldn't help but imagine it.

On deck, the pirates were waiting. A third little boat was making its way towards the yacht. There was only one man in it, but there were also two goats, and that was a surreal sight, believe me. It was welcome, too, though. There was something awful about being on that yacht in the middle of the ocean, with all that blue blankness stretched out around us. What's the word? Agoraphobia? I think so. And then, at the same time, the opposite thing. Claustrophobia. On the one hand, we were trapped on what was really quite a small boat, with these pirates everywhere. On the other hand, there was nothing but sea and sky around us, right to the horizon.

Thinking about that made me dizzy, so when the little boat appeared, a dot far away that moved slowly closer, it was like we became a bit more anchored somehow. Like the boat was tracing a line that joined us to something else – another ship, land.

What I mean is, I looked at that boat and I didn't only think about the boat; I thought about the place it came from. I thought about land, earth. A beach, or a port. It wasn't just a boat: it was a possibility of another place.

Then, when I saw the goats, I stopped having those kind of philosophical thoughts and I just stared. This guy chugged up to the diving platform, standing by the outboard motor, the goats in front of him, dark-furred and white-bearded, bleating at the low waves. The sun was setting behind him, which just added to the craziness, red lava pouring on to the sea over the horizon, setting it on fire.

It was goats, on a boat, in the middle of the sea. I'll never forget it.

Also on the new wooden boat were boxes of all sorts of stuff. The first two boats had heaps of boxes, too, as it turned out. I guess all this cargo had come from the mother ship, as Tony called it.

There were:

Like, a hundred cartons of cigarettes, at least.

Massive cartons of dried pasta.

A gas stove.

Tins with French writing on them.

Lots of bottles of booze.

Thousands – I mean, thousands – of litres of water in big bottles.

All of these things were in just huge quantities, which I didn't take as a good sign at all. And I could tell from the look on the stepmother's face that she didn't, either. I found out after, from Farouz, that all this stuff came from a French container ship that the pirates had taken the previous month. It was clever, really, to reuse the spoils from a previous mission. Actually, I don't know why I say
really
, because, as I quickly learned, the pirates were very clever indeed. And very organised.

So yeah, it was smart. And it meant, I realised sickly, that they could be here a long time.

Right then, though, I was watching the pirates carting cigarettes – they loved cigarettes – up into the yacht, watching them drive the two goats up on to the deck, where they tethered them.

It was total chaos, as you can imagine. The goats did not want to get on the yacht, and they resisted the pirates' attempts to move them, squealing in a creepily human way and kicking. When one of the goats was finally forced on to the diving platform, it bolted, clattering on its unsteady hooves through the door, into the dining room. One of the pirates had to plunge in after it, and emerged a few minutes later, cursing, bleeding for some reason from his nose, pushing the complaining goat ahead of him. It was a good half an hour before the goats were tied up.