‘She barely sleeps,’ whispers Jamilah worriedly. ‘She barely eats. Mahmoud’s nearly two months old now, and she’s skin and bones.’
Maryam mostly sits in her darkened room, staring at the wall, holding Mahmoud listlessly. She barely manages to smile or reply when you go in to talk to her.
All the while, travellers come and go from the white house on the hill – although fewer people are arriving, and more are permanently stuck here, since the Australian government started sending asylum seekers to detention centres on remote islands.
‘I’ve had enough,’ you tell Jamilah. ‘I’m going to get Majid back.’
You’ve talked about this before, but Maryam and Jamilah have always talked you out of it, because you might never come back.
‘You can’t!’ she cries. ‘Please don’t. You’ll be arrested too!’
‘Who cares!’ you cry back. ‘Jamilah, this whole system is just sick. Don’t you know that Majid and Maryam ran away from violence just like we did? They didn’t have anywhere else to go! They’ve been here for two-and-a-half years, and just over that ocean out there is Australia, a place we’ve all nearly died trying to get to, and the best they can do is leave us to rot in Indonesia or send us to some jail on a tiny island. To hell with that! I’m not going to sit here in fear anymore. Get me all the cash we have. Hopefully these jailers will take a bribe.’
Armed with a hefty wad of Indonesian notes, you catch the bus into Jakarta. There, you find a tuktuk driver who speaks good English. He agrees to take you to the jail and, for an extra cost, translate for you.
The jail is a grey, concrete box near the outskirts of town. At the front desk sits a bored-looking man in a green uniform.
‘Tell him I’m here to pay bail for the release of Majid Ahmadi,’ you say, trying to quell the trembling in your voice.
‘He wants to see your papers,’ says the tuktuk driver after a brief exchange in Indonesian.
Your heart starts to hammer, but you will yourself to not back down now.
‘Tell him I have plenty of paper,’ you say, drawing some banknotes from your pocket. Then you put on an even more forceful voice, despite your nerves: ‘Now get me Majid Ahmadi. Or I’ll find someone else who will.’
The green-uniformed guard regards you for a long while through narrowed brown eyes. At last he replies. ‘Bail is fifteen million rupiah,’ translates your driver.
That’s an astronomical sum – more than this guard would earn in a year. You have two million rupiah in your pocket now, sent by Aadan last week; it’s meant to cover rent, food and phone calls for the next few months.
Luckily, the guard is prepared to haggle, and eventually he gives a curt nod and disappears. You wait for ages, as guards walk by carrying handcuffs and batons, eyeing you suspiciously. Your heart is still racing.
When Majid finally appears, you gasp. He’s a walking skeleton – he looks even worse than Maryam. He moves gingerly, as though every movement hurts. But he manages to give you a gleaming smile.
‘I HAVE A present for you,’ you say to Maryam, standing in the doorway to her darkened room.
When you step back to reveal Majid, she starts giving dry, shaking sobs of disbelief. Majid folds Maryam and Mahmoud into his arms, looking down at his son for the first time. With a lump in your throat, you slip away and leave them to it.
That night, you call Aadan and there’s a fire in your belly. You still haven’t heard anything back from the UNHCR about your appointment, and it’s been six months since you arrived in Indonesia and registered your name with them.
‘If I won’t get on a boat, and I can’t get an appointment with the UNHCR, then I’m trapped in no-man’s-land,’ you tell him. ‘What happened to Majid could just as easily have happened to me, or even to Jamilah. Meanwhile, everything I found out about Bright Dream is gathering dust, while al-Shabaab continues their reign of terror. It’s driving me nuts!’
You still carry the pen everywhere in your pocket, but the risks you took to keep it safe have amounted to nothing.
‘We talked about this,’ says Aadan. ‘It’s too risky to publish what you know until we can be sure that you, Jamilah and Rahama are in a safe country.’
There’s still been no sign of Aunty Rahama. The first rush of hope faded long ago, and now you’re all trying to fight back the creeping, despairing fear that maybe she didn’t make it after all.
You think about the fact that although you’ve been stuck here for months now, in some ways you’ve come further than you could have imagined. You saved baby Mahmoud’s life, after all, and you brought Majid back to his family.
‘I don’t care anymore,’ you tell Aadan. ‘I’m going to go ahead and put the story out there.’
Despite his protests, you go down to the internet cafe the next day and spend hours writing your story. Then with Majid’s help, you attach all the files on the pen and email it to the major Kenyan, Somali and international news agencies.
You know news of your location might filter back to al-Shabaab if the story’s published, and you know it’s possible they’ll have related terrorist gangs here in Indonesia they could use to target you. Nevertheless, you’re ready to strike your final blow to this monster that’s been shadowing you ever since the bomb blast at the broadcasting building in Mogadishu.
You punch ‘send’ and close your eyes in triumph.
A FEW DAYS tick by with no reply. Then, suddenly, your phone and email start running hot. One agency picked up the story, the others caught the scent, and it has now snowballed into a major news item.
One call is different from the rest – it’s the UNHCR office
