Rip Tide

It had been a life of hard labour and long hours, but the coast was beautiful, the waters calm, and the fish plentiful. They did not want for anything that mattered.

One day men had come, armed with automatic rifles. They had wanted to borrow the skiff but his father had said no. They went away, but a week later they were back. Again the men asked for the use of his father’s boat, and again his father refused.

Then they shot his father.

For a while, Taban and his brother had struggled on, borrowing a skiff from neighbours when they could and continuing to fish, though without their father there the lorry driver cheated them when they tried to sell their catch. Precarious as their new life was, they survived. Until one day his brother went to Mogadishu, looking for a cousin of theirs who might be able to help them. He had not come back, and after three months Taban assumed he must be dead, for why else would he not have returned?

Taban had tried to make a go of it alone, but he was still too small to handle the nets himself, and he could not catch enough fish on lines to make a living. He hoped for a while to be taken on by another fisherman, but the catches were growing poorer every day, and there was no money for extra hands. Soon only a few fishermen remained in the hamlet, trying their luck in the shallow shoals that had once been fertile fishing grounds; occasionally a band of strangers would come and commandeer several of the abandoned shacks, using them as a temporary base before moving on.

When Khalid and his gang had arrived they’d built a compound of their own. They began with a high perimeter wall, built of boulders and salvaged bricks. Taban had walked over there one morning after he’d failed for the fifth successive day to catch any fish. There were roughly thirty men under Khalid’s command, and none of them were fishermen. But when Khalid learned that Taban knew the coastline his eyes had lit up, and soon the boy was not only lugging water buckets to the men building the wall and serving Khalid his meals of kebabs cooked over the fire, he was also going out to sea with them. He hadn’t understood at first what they were doing; they were not interested in fishing but wanted to understand the tides and currents for some purpose of their own. It was later, when they brought groups of foreigners in lorries from further down the coast, that he realised these men were pirates, carrying out raids on the big ships that sailed the shipping lanes far out to sea, and that the foreigners were their prisoners.

All the men were afraid of Khalid. He had a house they had built for him inside the compound, a bare-walled structure constructed of breeze-blocks, but inside it seemed the height of luxury to Taban, equipped with electricity from a generator, an enormous television that received hundreds of programmes through a dish on the roof, a refrigerator full of food, even alcohol stored in a rack. Khalid was not cruel to Taban, but the boy worked hard merely for his food and a place to sleep, no wages. And he was never allowed to leave the compound on his own.

Now, as Taban leaned forward to stir the stew again, a large hand suddenly gripped his wrist. It was the Tall One, the name Taban had given to the leader of a new band of men who had arrived in the camp some weeks ago and taken it over. He was a massive figure, well over six feet tall, with a long ragged beard. He and his gang had come under cover of darkness, in jeeps. Their only luggage had been weapons – AK-47s, two grenade launchers, and quantities of sidearms.

Khalid had not resisted this challenge to his authority. When they insisted Taban should act as their factotum – which meant cook for the most part – Khalid had just nodded. The men kept to themselves, and treated Taban with suspicion when they were not ignoring him altogether. He noticed that they spent much of their time at prayer, kneeling or stretching out on small rugs they laid on the sand; the rest of the time they conducted classes among themselves, each of them taking turns to be the ‘teacher’ of the group. He had heard enough words he recognised, even when spoken in their strange dialect, to realise these men were not simple pirates. But then what were they doing here? He had wanted to ask Khalid, but fear held him back.

Now the Tall One let go of Taban’s wrist and looked down at the stew, inspecting it closely. Then he stared at the boy with a penetrating gaze; the young Somali felt as if the man’s eyes were boring into his brain. At last, the Tall One nodded at him with a grunt. He spoke sharply and his comrades came over and began to serve themselves, while Taban stood back, waiting. At one point the Tall One gestured towards the boy, and the other men looked at him, then muttered to each other. Taban knew they were talking about him.