You Only Get One Life (7 page)

Suddenly everyone was crazy about my Scandinavian look and my short hair; I was the new trend everywhere. Milanese designer Luciano Soprani was huge in the ‘80s. He’s since passed away but back then he worked with Max Mara, Heliette, Basile, Nazareno and Gabrielli, all key figures in Italian fashion. Luciano hired me when he was head designer for Gucci and he was crazy about me. And because
he
was crazy about me, everybody else wanted me. The assistants at the modelling agency hardly had time to keep up – Giorgio Armani, Gianni Versace… everyone was calling for me. I travelled to exotic locations for photoshoots in private jets and might be having brunch with Mick Jagger one morning and tea with Prince Albert of Monaco the same day. This was the genuine big-time. And I was still only 17.

When you go fast in modelling, you go
really
fast. Everything was bigger, better… it was an effort to remember it all but I tried because here was my dream becoming reality and it was all happening at once. Mostly it was all good, it was really fun. I met some incredible people and I quickly got used to the VIP lifestyle. However, when things went wrong, I thought I was going to die.

That was 1981. Ever since then I have had problems with loud sounds. Even the noise of something so innocuous as the boiler going on can be terrifying and I can’t stand
fireworks on New Year’s Eve. The cause was what had seemed to be nothing more threatening than a prestigious campaign to promote Fila bikinis in the beautiful Seychelles islands in the Indian Ocean, off the east coast of Africa. I was really excited to have been chosen.

Along with four other models I flew from Milan direct to the island of Mahe. We were driven to an amazing resort on the far side. A delegation from Fila greeted us and the five of us bikini models were treated like rock stars. We had two days to relax, have cocktails and we were under instruction to be sure to sunbathe so that we had some colour on us. It was promising to be a very good gig.

One of the other models warned me and Nickie, an American girl who was, like me, very fair-skinned, to make sure that we didn’t get too much sun on us. Of course, what did I do? Cocktails… sunshine… gossiping about boys… having fun. I was a wide-eyed Danish girl with a great body in a five-star resort and I was soaking it all up. After the two days I was covered in sunburn. The photographer freaked out.

‘We’re supposed to be shooting, just go and get that seen to! Get some cream or something,’ he said. ‘We start tomorrow morning.’ I was too young to have got a Danish driving licence and Nickie said she’d drive me. The photographer told us to use the hotel jeep as the Seychelles didn’t have much infrastructure at that time. There were just three main resorts on the whole island and the nearest decent shops were on the other coast.

For me at that age even being driven in a jeep was an exciting adventure in itself. We weren’t likely to get lost as there was only one proper tarmac road and that took us past
the airport again. As we got near it, we passed a truck full of locals. They were all screaming in French – the Seychelles having once been controlled by France. I’d picked up very little French during my unhappy sojourn in Paris and had absolutely no idea what they were telling us, but it was clear they were not happy. To me as an ignorant young thing in paradise their attitude struck me as unnecessary. ‘Imagine being so angry in such a beautiful place,’ I told Nickie. She was distracted by the petrol station inside the airport perimeter and decided to take what might be her only opportunity to fill up before we went on with our shopping.

As Nickie paid for the fuel two men approached us. They were both white, which was unusual enough on the island. More ominously, they were sweaty, clearly irritated and each carried a machine gun. A big machine gun each. Nickie and I looked at each other before trying a smile and a ‘Hi, how are you?’ while failing to disguise our terror. These guys weren’t even wearing uniforms and were clearly not police, much less regular army. We managed to get something out of them in English. There had been a coup. I later found out that the President of the Seychelles, France-Albert René, had instigated a Socialist government in a move that triggered the takeover.

‘You’ve got very little time,’ they said. ‘See that doorway?’ They pointed over to the tiny airport. We saw a small group of people about a hundred metres away, all running towards the entrance the men were pointing out. ‘Go,’ they said.

I don’t know if we left our bags, I can’t really remember much about the order of events. We started running towards the fence that separated the station from the check-in
entrance. You normally had to make your way around it to get into the departure area but gunfire from somewhere behind us raked the ground and if we still had anything, we dropped it and screaming, fought our way over the fence and towards the door. The facilities at the airport were as basic as the resorts and the door we found looked like it might have belonged to a shabby office. As we pulled it shut behind us, the sound of bullets ceased.

We were definitely in some kind of administration area. It was quite a small room, certainly not big enough to comfortably contain the 40 or so people we were sharing it with and who right then were looking at us in terror. The furniture was old-fashioned and cheap. We were the only two white people in the room and given that the coup was being staged by whites, it seemed the others thought we were part of the attacking force. Although we tried to explain that we had nothing to do with what was going on, that we were just as much in trouble as they were, they didn’t look as if they believed us.

There was an old English guy there who had taken shelter with his daughter. When we got talking to him he said that the attempt to take over the island could get very serious; the gunmen hadn’t followed us but it felt like we had been thrown in a prison cell as surely as if the door had been locked. The heat would have been unbearable even if so many weren’t jammed in together. It was 37 degrees and 80 per cent humidity with the only light coming from narrow windows running around the top of the walls of the room. There was no ventilation, no air conditioning and even though we couldn’t see out of the room because the
windows were set so high up, we could hear constant noise. Gunfire, explosions. The room glowed dull red with each blast and our nerves were increasingly shredded as time inched by.

At last the door was kicked open without warning by two men, one a redhead – originally from Holland, as I found out later. They were part of the mercenary force and both had machine guns. The redhead seemed particularly jumpy, sort of pumped up and angry. It seemed as if he was on something, like he was only just hanging on to his self-control. He was clearly ready to kill anyone who so much as looked at him the wrong way. For no reason I could make out – he hardly needed to scare us more – he shot out all the glass in the little windows above us. The noise of the machine gun in such a confined space was deafening. The room shook with the sustained burst of fire and you could feel the vibrations from the weapon judder through you. Some of the other hostages put their hands over their ears, everyone ducked, some screamed. It was chaos. Shattered glass rained down on us and when at last it was over, not a single window was left. The two men disappeared, leaving the group dazed, sobbing, crouched by the walls and sitting in broken glass.

We were abandoned without anything to eat and, more tellingly in the stifling heat, without any water. Hours passed and we lapsed into a kind of trance. One of the other women just cried continuously, another kept getting cramps, another was rocking and humming to herself.

Some time later the same two men came back, kicking the door open before they entered as if they really thought we
might be ready to somehow overpower them. ‘Don’t try anything stupid!’ the manic redhead shouted in English. I don’t know how or if the locals could understand exactly what he was saying, but nobody had any plans to be heroes. ‘We’ve taken over the whole island. If you try to leave this room you will be shot!’ It was English and I didn’t need to be fluent to understand what he meant.

I wasn’t able to say exactly how long we had been held, but 10 hours or more must have passed. It was beginning to get dark outside and even from where we were lying on the floor we could see fire lighting up the evening somewhere outside the airport. There was no relief from the heat. It felt like the night was going to be even more humid than the day. The broken windows allowed in thick, humid air heavy with the smell of gun smoke and burning. Tension was beginning to give way to hysteria. A few of the group had diarrhoea. Whether they were ill already or it was just the shock was impossible to say. There was no toilet and the stench mingled with the sweat in the oppressive atmosphere and the sounds of weeping. From outside, gun battles continued as the light faded.

Would Mum and Dad have heard about the coup? How could I reach them? Nickie and I had curled ourselves up under an office table while almost everyone else was slumped against the far walls. The Englishman stayed near us but the rest kept their distance. In addition to the language barrier there was an increasing sense of a racial barrier between us. No matter how tired and scared and sweaty we looked, we were still the white girls and the stares were suspicious. The red-headed guy had looked at
the others with particular viciousness; you could tell he really hated black people and I think they had us down as more like him. They seemed to be waiting for us to do something. And for my part, as it got darker I could make out little more than the eyes of the other hostages. Their skin colour became harder to make out for my overloaded senses. The noise was constant and the accumulated temperature over the day made the air thick and heavy.

There was a second door in the room which our English friend became convinced led to the toilet. ‘Please don’t try it,’ I whispered, when he decided to crawl slowly over to open it. ‘When they come in and shoot you, they’ll shoot us too because we’re here.’ He did it anyway. I knew it wouldn’t be a toilet and it wasn’t. It opened onto a much smaller room, almost a cupboard. There was a kind of fax machine in there with its own keyboard. Rather than send a sheet of paper, you typed directly on the machine itself – and each key press was accompanied by a loud beep. We cringed at each sound as the English guy, watched by his anxious daughter and us beyond tried to get a message to the outside world.

In terror, we waited for the outside door to our prison to fly open and the sound of machine guns. That fucking machine! It chirruped away for what seemed like years. Our friend had a business card from his hotel on the island and he was faxing to say we were captives. We had no way of knowing whether or not the hotel was in the hands of the mercenaries; we might have just told our captors to come and kill us. At last he finished, the message was sent and at least something had been done. We were all so tired, apart
from anything else. The constant fear, the uncertainty was sapping what little energy we had left. We could talk only in low voices. A new and louder series of beeps from the fax in the other room announced a reply.

We looked at one another helplessly. There was no way of stopping the machine if anyone outside heard, but fortunately the message was very short. It revealed that the island wasn’t totally under the control of the mercenaries; there were a dozen in all from Holland and we found out later that they’d pretended to be baseball players. The cases for their bats contained guns and when they were discovered at the airport they shot their way out. Their plan was being put into action that morning just as we turned up to buy petrol and saw them in their casual baseball outfits. A rescue force from South Africa had already flown in to retake the territory. They were engaging the mercenaries in battle and said they would rescue us within 12 hours. It was fantastic news but it seemed a long way off. I felt so sick I wasn’t sure I was going to make it much longer.

When the door was next kicked open the men didn’t come in themselves, but they did throw in a six-pack of Coke. It was a callous joke – six cans between 40. They would have been better to give us nothing. I’d like to say that it was rationed depending on need, but the truth was that 40 desperate hostages climbed over each other to get to the warm drinks. I had no chance. I became convinced that I was going to die in here.
How can we survive? We’re not even helping each other
, I thought. You hope that when you find yourself in an emergency that you behave with dignity and bravery, but you never know what you’re going to do
beforehand. When someone’s got a gun to your head, you react instinctively. There’s something deep inside you which tells you what to do and you can plan.

But this was another time when I could swear that I had a guardian spirit watching over me. A fierce orange glow lightened the room and more smoke drifted through the windows. A young girl next to me seemed to make up her mind. ‘Fire,’ she said. ‘We’re going.’ She pulled open the door. There was no discussion, no more waiting in fear as cans of drink were discarded on the floor.
Let’s run
, we all thought. Everyone got to their feet and without looking to see who might be waiting, we pushed through the main door.

Less than two hours had passed since we read the fax confirming help was on its way. It was too dark and confusing to see exactly what was going on but I could tell from the explosions where the battle for the airport was being fought. We were caught in the middle and our group scattered in panic as each of us chose whichever direction seemed most likely to lead to safety.

I focused on three figures I could just about make out who looked as if they were in uniform, pulling Nickie along with me. Another one of our group kept up until he dropped to the ground right next to us: he’d been shot. And the thing that haunts me to this day is that Nickie and I kept going – we didn’t stop for him, we ran. I don’t know what happened to him but I think he probably didn’t make it.

The two of us soon reached the men who were indeed from the military. They had commandeered an ambulance and knocked out its windows. We lay on the floor and they took us at high speed to a hospital on the other side of the island.
The men were heavily armed. Nowhere was safe at this point and they didn’t know where the invading force was.