Writing for Fun
Captured - Maureen Rampersaud
April 2014
The car's headlights moved very slowly along the road surrounding the field. Mo told us to keep down, but the fact that his robes were glowing white in the darkness worried me a little. One minute we were sitting in a restaurant with this really friendly guy who had asked us out to dinner, the next he had rushed us out at top speed, mumbling about some men who were after him.
We followed his lead and crawled along the lumpy, ploughed earth, all the while we watched the slow, predatory prowl of the headlights encircling us. We had hitched as far as Palermo, I mean we all hitched in those days, then we took the boat to Tunis. All our fellow travellers said it would 'blow our minds'. I pondered this as I started to quiver with fear and continued in the wake of Mo's flapping, very visible robes. We were nearing the ditch when the headlights disappeared. Mo stopped, frozen with indecision. I really felt we'd been transported to the wild, where there was no nice ordered society with rules. This felt like predator and prey and I wished I could switch roles.
Evidently Mo decided to act, even at the risk of being a moving target, because he lurched forward and rolled into the ditch. We swiftly followed him and lay as quietly as three terrified people could. My heart was beating so loudly that it could have been sending distress signals home to England. We lay like that for ages, listening, in vain, for sounds of someone approaching. I had decided to suggest we could make a move when a torch snapped on, blinding us. Three men shouting in Arabic, grabbed Mo and marched him off, leaving us there, petrified. We heard the slam of car doors and the screech of the car pulling away at speed.
We never found out what happened to Mo. We talked to the restaurant owners, the local police and even the Embassy, but kept coming up against brick walls. However, our inquiries threw up some rather alarming rumours about Mo in connection with drugs and white slavery. Perhaps the outcome of this was fortunate for us . . . if not for Mo.