J. Ledgard - Submergence

It was already dark. They sat at the desk in silence. It had begun to snow; again the winter night, again the illuminated sign above the hotel door spilling out.

These few facts and reflections, which had not even touched on biomathematics, nonetheless set in front of them a common question, which they were too tired to see: is man the joker god Loki, who must be bound in chains?

They had different understandings of time and space. He worked on the surface, the outside of the world. For him, everything was in flux. He was tasking agents to infiltrate mosques in Somalia and along the Swahili coast. He was concerned with alleys, beliefs, incendiary devices; with months, weeks, days, with indelible hours. For her, an age was an instant. She was interested in the base of the corrosive saltwater column, delimiting through mathematics the other living world which has existed in darkness and in continental dimensions for hundreds of millions of years.

‘Open your eyes. Open them.’

He did so. It was morning. The smoke-blackened room was empty except for a mujahid — from Chechnya by the look of him — who was squatting by the door breaking apart a Zastava machine gun and placing the pieces in a satchel. The colour coming through the windows and door was blue. Yusuf was dressed like a Mogadishu Bakara market trader in jeans, sandals and a short-sleeved shirt, sunglasses tucked in the pocket. Only the scars of a flesh wound on his neck hinted at his cause and fight.

‘You’re alive. Good. Drink this,’ Yusuf said, and passed him a cup of water.

He drank from it.

The Chechnyan brought over the satchel with the gun in it and, at Yusuf’s command, held the oil lamp close to James’s face, close enough to feel the heat of the glass. Yusuf moved in behind the lamp. He had shaved off his beard in the night. His face had become massive, scarred.

‘Why are you here?’ Yusuf asked, in Arabic and the broken English he had learned in Peshawar.

‘I’ve told your men,’ he replied, in Arabic. ‘I’m a water engineer.’ To his own ears, his voice sounded weak and faraway. ‘I wanted, I want, to plan a water system for Kismayo. I was invited.’

‘Not to do something else?’

‘No.’

‘We are fighting a war here.’

‘I understand, but your people need water.’

Your people. Did Yusuf have any people?

There was the sound of laughter from outside, rare laughter, but it altered nothing in there. There was no equality between them. Yusuf was a Somali, never tiresome about black and white, always superior.

The man’s teeth were yellow in the dankness, rodent yellow. The eyes were yellow also, from a liver complaint. Big eyes: he was one of those brigands who never blinked when he pulled a pistol on an unfortunate.

He identified it as a Ceska, a beautiful gun, easy to handle. It must have been a Somali army officer’s sidearm from when the country was a client state of the USSR. The grip had been painted over with enamel flowers, most probably in Afghanistan.

‘Is your work important to you?’

‘Yes, very much,’ he said, and like a prayer he said to himself, water be my cover, water cover me.

Yusuf touched the tattoo on his arm with the pistol. A parachute. The regimental badge.

‘What is this?’ Yusuf asked.

‘A mistake. I had it done when I was young.’

‘Coming here was a mistake.’

The pistol was jammed deeper into his face. He felt the 0 on his cheek, pressed to his teeth.

‘Please, don’t. I am needed. Please, please.’ He wept. He was shameless. Standing in the sea at the moment he believed was his death he had said nothing, yet now he thought he would say anything to survive, or perhaps he did not believe Yusuf would pull the trigger. The sky was not closing in, he was not turning, no, the pistol was exploratory, another way of getting to know him.

‘You have children?’

‘No children.’

‘A wife?’

‘I am not married. My employees rely on me, and so do …’

‘We will call you Mr Water,’ Yusuf said, decisively.

‘My name is James. I need to make a phone call to my family. I need to let them know I am alive. We can organise a deal. I am worth more alive than dead. I am worth a sum of money.’

Yusuf held the Ceska by its flowery grip as if to pistol-whip him. ‘When we want to know about water, you will tell us. My men wanted to put you to death. I said no, Islam looks gently on the merciful, and your work is merciful. What nation are you?’

‘British.’

‘Correct. You are British and you are worth nothing. There is no money. The Spanish they pay, the Germans they pay, the British they never pay.’

Yusuf broke into long recitations in Somali. After some time, he made an aside in Arabic. ‘How sweet it would be at Eid, if instead of slaughtering an animal in the name of Allah, we would slaughter an unbeliever.’

Involuntarily, James shook. It was a shattered fairytale. Fee-fi-fo-fum! I smell the blood of an Englishman. Be he alive or be he dead, I’ll cut off his fucking head. Fictions, none of them buoyant. Yusuf believed that Allah had hung an invisible curtain from the top of the sky to the bottom, separating the believers from the unbelievers. He was looking for quarantine, not Leviathan.

‘Do you drink alcohol, Mr Water?’

‘Yes, I drink.’

‘Alcohol separates you from the Creator.’

‘No doubt,’ he said. He was rotted through, anyone could see that; his kidneys infected, his piss sea green, and the sun was coming, illuminating the doorway, the shrine in the courtyard, but he wanted a tumbler of whisky, Macallan, Bell’s, Paddy, whatever; some ice, the bottle left open on the floor beside him.

‘It is important to me that you are treated generously. It is Allah’s wish,’ Yusuf said.

‘Thank you,’ he said, lowering his eyes.

Yusuf demanded submission and James offered it, while the truth of their exchange was that the Somali had ordered him to be held hostage, to be laid in his own waste, and to be beaten there. He had lost a tooth, another two were loose, his nose was broken, his ribs fractured. They had sliced open his hand and shoulder with a blade and in another tussle a mujahid had reached in and grabbed his cock and balls and yanked down on them, tearing a muscle.

It was true. He was worth nothing. Yusuf already had his passport, phone, electronic tablet and his watch. Her Majesty’s Government would never pay for his release. They would not even acknowledge the kidnapping in his case, unless forced to do so by a precise piece of reporting.

Somalia was dried up. The rains had failed. The people were dying of thirst, and he knew better than any real engineer that he was alive only on the promise of water. He was grateful to live on as Mr Water.

‘You will go to see the doctor,’ Yusuf said, quietly. ‘He will take care of you. You will eat, you will drink. Understand?’

He looked away. ‘Yes.’

‘Hold out your hands,’ Yusuf said.

He held them out.

‘Take this.’ Yusuf placed in his hands a small bottle of perfume with a sticker of a rose on it. ‘Open it.’

It was cloying; the substance was sticky, like deodorant dispensed from a plastic ball. ‘Thank you.’

Nothing more was said. There was only the tick-tock of the plastic clock above the door and the sound of the surf and the wind coming through the cracks in the thick walls and the muttering of the mujahid — he was a Chechen. Yusuf stood up and slung the satchel with the machine gun over his shoulder. He sat up and watched the clean-shaven commander go down the whitewashed steps to the beach and seemingly into the sea.