J. Ledgard - Submergence

‘Has your brother ever come back to the island?’ he asked.

‘Course not! The police would have him in a minute. He’s gone for good. He’s an important man now.’

‘Do you find yourself embarrassed to talk about him? He’s killed a lot of innocent people.’

She shrugged. ‘Why should I be embarrassed? He has his cause. He wants to help the Palestinians. Who else is fighting for them?’

‘You said he was fighting for the family.’

‘Come on now.’

The French news played on a television. He ordered another coffee and a pastry. It was winter in France. There were blizzards in Auvergne. There was a picture of a ski slope, of snow blowing over a road and sheep huddled by a wall.

‘A lot of snow in France this year,’ she remarked.

When they came out of the café there were soldiers on the street. They belonged to the national army but looked like French paratroopers, with fatigues tucked into their boots, short-barrelled machine guns on their backs and some wearing mirrored sunglasses. There were no jobs on the island. There were always coups. Another one was on its way.

‘You’ve been very kind,’ he said. ‘Might I ask one more favour?’

‘But of course.’

‘I need a haircut. Do you think you could cut my hair?’

‘I’ve never cut gold hair!’

They took a communal taxi across the town. They were squeezed in the back with another woman. He was buttock to buttock between the two. They didn’t seem to mind. They were Muslim, but not so religious. Monique rested her hand absently on his knee. They stared at him, and he looked away. Women had rights on the island. They could vote, they could drive cars. The biggest hope was for a grand marriage, which bought entry into the island’s aristocracy.

If the terrorist had gone to France, if he had saved up and had a grand marriage, if he had been a maths teacher, if he had invested in Monique’s salon, if, if, he would never have blown up the United States Embassy in Nairobi, in an operation al-Qaeda called Kaaba, which killed 212 people and injured 4000 more.

‘I need a haircut. Do you think you could cut my hair?’

‘I’ve never cut gold hair!’

They took a communal taxi across the town. They were squeezed in the back with another woman. He was buttock to buttock between the two. They didn’t seem to mind. They were Muslim, but not so religious. Monique rested her hand absently on his knee. They stared at him, and he looked away. Women had rights on the island. They could vote, they could drive cars. The biggest hope was for a grand marriage, which bought entry into the island’s aristocracy.

If the terrorist had gone to France, if he had saved up and had a grand marriage, if he had been a maths teacher, if he had invested in Monique’s salon, if, if, he would never have blown up the United States Embassy in Nairobi, in an operation al-Qaeda called Kaaba, which killed 212 people and injured 4000 more.

Aziz was giving a clinic in the Bari slum when the fighters broke into the surgery and snatched James. The gap-toothed Saudi, Saif the lion, ordered him to get dressed. He was manhandled down the stairs and hauled into the back of a lorry idling in the street. Saif had been instructed to take some fighters and hide Mr Water in the badlands for a time, then reappear at an agreed spot. It was early in the morning. Kismayo did not stir.

The lorry was a cattle truck, smelling of animals, with benches on either side. A tarpaulin was drawn down over its metal ribs. He was jammed in near the front, between the Chechen who was called Qasab and a Somali boy — small and coiled like a snake — who was unceasingly enraged by real or made up crimes against the body of Islam.

His hands were bound, not his eyes, and so he was able to see the outskirts of Kismayo, framed through the back of the lorry. The exhaust fired, tins of bullets rattled on the metal floor, and the vehicle swayed and slammed on the broken road.

It grew hotter. Donkeys stood in the shade. The lorry turned onto a tarmac road dotted with starving people hobbling to the sea. Sometimes they collapsed on the road, so the fighters had to get down and carry them to the side before continuing. There was no food in the land. The rains had failed again and insecurity had kept the people from harvesting what little they had.

They passed an Italian plantation which had grown tomatoes and bananas for export. That was in the 1960s, when the seaside restaurants in Kismayo, Marka, and Mogadishu were full of customers, the waiters in uniforms, the bands playing, the sea azure, streaked with foamy white, and the pasta always al dente.

The gates into the plantation were broken now and the earth was split and ruined and the Italians were long gone. There was only a man in rags, scratching around under the trees for fallen fruit. When they went by he waved his stick over his head at them slowly and weakly.

The trees in Somalia were festooned in plastic bags of different colours, carried by the wind and snagged on branches. You could work out how many people lived in a settlement by the number of plastic bags on the trees. As they drove on there were fewer and fewer and then there were none. That was how he knew they had left inhabited Somalia behind and rattled into the badlands.

He put his head around the door of the hotel office and asked if he might briefly check his email on the hotel computer. He scanned the messages and then searched for her. He found a homepage on the Imperial College website. She looked younger in the photograph. She was smiling. The page explained her work. The terminology was difficult to follow. At the bottom was a reference to a hydrothermal vent field she had named: the northernmost vent field yet discovered. He read in the online dictionary that ‘flinders’ described moths as well as shards and that Matthew Flinders was a Royal Naval officer who had circumnavigated Australia for the first time.

He took his morning coffee in the billiards room with the busts. He opened a window and looked out over the parkland. There was a tree whose branches reached down to the snow like an arm. There was a redbrick chimney visible in the woods: early industrial, slender, tapering and long disused. To breathe the clean air, turf, sea, snow, was a luxury after the dirt and jet fuel smog of Africa. There was a mirror in the room and he stood looking at himself; or rather, because he was not vain in that way, he regarded his other self caught inside the mirror.

Darkness, where is its place? In the ocean. In rock. In a passage of caves, for example, newly found in Europe’s Moravian karst, some with cathedral-sized chambers 70 metres long, 30 metres wide and 50 metres high.

The end of these chambers has not been reached because an underground river flows too swiftly and deeply to be crossed. The breathing apparatus available to professional cavers is not sufficient. Behind the river, continuing down for kilometres, are chambers which have never been illuminated.

It was what the United States Army called off-grid. It existed on maps and satellite photos, but was without water, so without settlement. The only tracks were those the camel herders picked out across the pubic scrub of thorn trees and in the wadis.