Mosbi Lessons

This story should begin with shouting, but how? It’s a language none of us understands, so the syllables escape me. But the meaning is unmistakeable, belted straight from the most intimate places that give us sound: loud and angry and panicked and menacing. This is the sound of someone who is about to hijack your life. He has burst out of the bush with a machete, his mate is carrying a shotgun, and these do not require translation.

Shit. Someone to my right – I think it’s Dave – exhales a whispered expletive, as Don, our guide and trainer, says quietly: Get down on the ground guys. The men are still yelling (I think there are three of them), and I drop slowly, and bury my face in a tussock of grass. I don’t want to look at them. My sunglasses are cutting into my face (stupid Rayban knock-offs) and there is dirt on my lips.

My palms are flat on the ground, either side of my head, and in a moment of lucid absurdity, I imagine the voice of my yoga teacher: Now, pushing up into downward-facing dog… Instead, I catch a word in Tok Pisin that is terrifyingly comprehensible: Meri. Woman. Girl.

I am tapped on the back, nudged upright and one of them walks me back towards our van. I do not want to get in that van. I do not want to get in that van. The other six are still on the ground, but now Lisa is hauled to her feet, then Laura. The man with the gun shouts something, and I slowly climb and duck into the vehicle. Lisa is clearly stressed, and loses a thong as she scrambles over the back, closely followed by Laura, and the man with the bush knife, who yells relentlessly in Tok Pisin as the other two jump the front seats and take off at reckless velocity, the cab doors swinging.

“Heads down! Heads down!” We are pelting off road, down a steep and sparsely populated lookout slope, when the driver hits the breaks and Laura jolts, almost into the lap of our grass-crowned assailant. He cracks a grin.

“Exercise over. Okay, girls. You all pass.” And Laura – pretty, quirky, irreverent Laura, who does not miss a beat – taps his improvised camouflage, an impressive headpiece of twisted grass, and says in a sweet little voice: “I like this.”

[The cheat sheet on car-jackings: do what the man with the machete says, and you’ll be, if not fine, at least better off than if you don’t. If you are lucky, he might even turn out to be a clean-shaven mining engineer from Perth.]