Free Hostage Three by Nick Lake

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.
    We moved as far away from the animals as we could. Already, one of them had shat on the mahogany slats of the deck. I could smell them, too, that sour, musky smell of animals that feed on grass.
    â€” I make good curry with goats, said Felipe, who up till this point hadn’t said very much.
    â€” Goats? said the stepmother.
    â€” Yes. It’s quite sensible, if you think about it, said Dad. They don’t have to worry about meat perishing, and the goats supply milk as well as –
    â€” Oh, shut up, James, said the stepmother.
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Later that first night , when we were inside, there didn’t seem to be any plan, or any sense of what we were meant to do. We asked Farouz if we could go to bed, and he shrugged and walked away, as if it were a matter of total indifference to him what we did. Even when he shrugged, I noticed how he moved kind of liquidly – not graceful, exactly, because that makes him sound like a dancer. More like someone comfortable in his own skin.
    That struck me because it was so different to the boys at school, who didn’t seem to have settled into their post-puberty bodies yet. The word people always use for that is gangly . But a lot of those boys weren’t gangly – some of them were pretty bulky, or average size. They just didn’t move like they knew their bodies very well. Or it was like their bodies had been made for some other mind to move into. Farouz, though – he moved like his body was a glove and his mind was the hand.
    Tony had insisted on going outside to see what was going on, but he needed to lean on Dad’s shoulder and Damian’s to do so. He wasn’t in terrible shape, but he wasn’t doing well, either. He had gone quite pale. When we got back to the cinema room and had put him on the couch, I tapped Dad on the shoulder.
    â€” Let’s go and see if we can get him some painkillers, I said.
    Dad nodded. He told the stepmother to wait with Damian, Felipe and Tony, then we went to look for Ahmed.
    On the way, we passed our cabins. I was puzzled to see little paper signs with amounts of money written on them over the doors. I guessed the pirates must have stuck them there:
    $500 on the door to my room.
    $1,000 on Dad and the stepmother’s door.
    And, on the door to the bridge, $5,000 .
    I pointed them out to Dad, who splayed his hands out in an I-don’t-have-a-clue gesture.
    We found Ahmed on the bridge. He was watching the radar screen – I suppose he or Farouz must have known how to turn it back on, because I’d seen Damian surreptitiously turn it off when we were boarded. On it, a pretty big dot, glowing and bleeping, was slowly moving towards us from the