Dave was also one of the nicest people I knew. He chatted to anyone that everyone else was studiously ignoring—the strange fellow in the corner of the bar who had some Tourette’s-like syndrome that compelled him to snort compulsively like a pig; the edgy contractor just back from Kandahar, enjoying his first taste of alcohol in six months and loudly declaring that he only lived to ‘Drink, fuck and fight’; the drunk NGO girl who was crying because she lost her shoes (and a fair bit of dignity) as she staggered to the bathroom. You rarely saw Dave without a smile; he seldom swore . . . He was so sweet he was positively gooey.
Sienna arrived on the scene after Gary took over The Den. She was engaged to Gary’s best mate and soon became a fixture. The fact that I had moved on to Rahimi’s by then meant that I didn’t get to meet her for a while but Dave constantly referenced her whenever he could.
‘I was talking to Sienna last night and . . .’ (insert—white noise . . .)
‘I texted Sienna yesterday and . . .’ (insert—white noise . . . )
‘I sent a funny email to Sienna the other day and . . .’ (insert—white noise . . .)
Nothing he ever said about Sienna bore any relevance to the discussion at hand. He just liked saying her name, a lot, and was soon being universally taunted for having a crush on this mysterious woman from the Land of the Long White Cloud.
When I finally met Sienna, I was thoroughly impressed. She was funny, friendly, smart and not afraid of a drink. I admit to having been slightly suspicious of her ability to look immaculately groomed at all times, and her predilection for wearing two-inch heels on the dusty Kabul streets disturbed me a little. But perhaps that was just straight-out envy, as I commonly looked like a bag of hammers in my oversized shirts and bulky headgear.
Dave quickly gave in to our teasing; I suspected he secretly enjoyed any stated association with Sienna. He finally confided to Marg and me via a meandering email, sent one morning at 3am, that he was indeed smitten.
From that point on, Dave discussed every exchange between himself and Sienna at great length—text messages were dissected for meaning; emails or conversations were probed for signs of reciprocated affection. After a month or two of this, Marg and I both gently ventured that it was all in his mind. Sienna was engaged, and had a rock on her finger the size of Uluru; he should just stop torturing himself and let it go.
So I was genuinely shocked when he turned up at brunch one Friday to announce that the hook-up had happened. I was with our mutual mate Ernie at the time and Dave bounced into the restaurant, positively beaming. He had partied with Sienna the previous night, but the white noise that typically followed that tired old opener took on a twist of Agatha Christie proportions.
Our last sighting of our hero on that particular evening had been at around 11pm. When both Ernie and I left the bar, he had been deep in conversation with his crush. Apparently, soon afterwards, an impromptu drinking session had been called at Sienna’s house and Dave had gone back with the pack.
He had crashed out in a spare room at some stage, with Sienna rightfully ensconced in bed next to her comatose fiancé. Some post-beddy-bye texting had ensued, with innocuous chatter about Dave being cold and Sienna having a spare blanket. But after the bedding had been duly delivered, with Sienna apparently tucking him in tight with a loving and lingering touch, Dave had taken the plunge and they had made out for twenty-two minutes!
This news sent Ernie straight to the bar for a sobering beer, while I sat trying to digest the information. I was intrigued on two levels: the obvious one was that Dave had actually scored, but of equal fascination was the fact that he had timed its duration so accurately.
My assumption that the hook-up was a one-off encounter was dispelled a week later when they organised a secret rendezvous in Dubai—Sienna was heading back from a business trip and Dave was flying home on leave. Sienna confessed that she, too, was terribly unhappy in her current relationship and the tryst was an undeniable success, as both of them departed the UAE determined to break up with their respective partners.
Dave copped a mobile phone to the head and a dressing down that went on for the duration of his time at home, but there was worse waiting for him when he returned to K-town. Dean was deeply disturbed by the cuckoldry, particularly as he had always ignorantly assumed, and outwardly proclaimed, that Dave was, in fact, gay. And, as opposed to Dave’s wife, he had more sinister resources at hand to mete out his revenge.
The lovely Gary acted as go-between. He phoned Dave up late one night, outlining three options for repairing the damage he had done. It was like Dante’s take on Who Wants to be a Millionaire?
A: He could take a solid beating, and end up dying in a ditch.
B: He could be set up for being a drug dealer, and rot in an Afghan jail.
OR (drum roll, please) . . .
C: He could pay Dean $110,000 for the inconvenience of having to find a new missus.
Dave’s glib suggestion that a ‘D: None of the above’ option should be included masked the fact that he was truly rattled. The beating of Dick Willy had only just occurred, and we all knew that Gary had both the means and the psychotic demeanour to carry out his threats. Still, loved up and truly happy for the first time in forever, Dave proudly stepped out with Sienna the following Thursday to see a live band.
Gary and Dean were also there. When the former cornered Dave, pushing him up against a wall and drunkenly insisting that he make a choice from Dean’s appealing list of demands, Dave’s personal security guard, a hulking, ex-Navy SEAL, stepped in to save him. Soon security contractors from both camps had entered the fray, resulting in some serious scuffling. While this ruckus was going on, Romeo and Juliet were unceremoniously dragged into an armoured vehicle and quickly spirited away.
A security-contractor blood feud is not in anyone’s interest—egos, guns and alcohol make for a volatile mix. And when Dave’s boss found out about the Thursday-night fiasco, he immediately shut the conflict down. Dave had only recently joined the company and had to bear the shameful responsibility for him and all his colleagues being confined to their compound for the next four weeks.
By the time Dave emerged from hiding, things had settled considerably. The bad blood continued to bubble for a while, but Sienna being called a ‘nerd fucker’ by her drunken ex-fiancé across the bar was vastly superior to having her current squeeze killed or thrown into jail.
After dissecting Marg’s break-up with her nut-job hook-up, we ended our night’s girly congress at Gandamak with lingering hugs, sloppy kisses and slurred mantras along the rather hackneyed lines of ‘All men are bastards’, before parting ways. But each of us knew that, come the next Thursday night, one of those bastards might just prove to be exactly the distraction needed for another chilly Friday-at-home in Kabul. Or perhaps even the bastard of our dreams.
Muffy and I had just spent the day in Jalalabad, working on what was undoubtedly the wildest shoot we had ever been on. We arrived back in Kabul hoarse, wind-blown, sunburnt, and exceedingly grateful for the copious wine and scrummy, home-baked dinner we were treated to at the home of some of our journo mates. Our dinner hosts had actually asked Moby whether they could do a story on the shoot. The bureau chief—the Big Juice—thought it would make a great feel-good story about Afghanistan, but our current CEO in Kabul, Saad (who had taken over from Jahid), wisely declined her request, correctly guessing that the day could just possibly go arse-end up.
The scene was for Season Two of Salam. Our team had been down in Jalalabad since February running the shoot themselves because Ahmad had prohibited Muffy and me from accompanying them due to security concerns. They had done a wonderful job to date but, knowing how potentially chaotic this day could get, Ahmad personally escorted us down there to assist them.
The script called for an uprising against the provincial governor and his mob of thugs. The local police were to arrive to quell the uprising; but they were unsuccessful until two helicopters, carrying counter-narcotics commandos, l
anded on a hilltop to save the day. Apart from our actors, the police, and the commandos, we had eighty extras—local lads who had never been on a set before.
Rounding up extras to appear on Afghan TV wasn’t very hard. It was not so much the lure of being on the small screen—a lot of locals didn’t even own televisions—but ten dollars for a day’s work was a good deal, and the guarantee of a free lunch proved a sweet incentive. But getting them to actually hang around on set and do their job could be a world of pain.
Sure, there was always a handful of boys who viewed it as a stepping-stone to stardom. They’d arrive on set with bouffant hair, shiny shirts and dazzling jeans for a funeral scene—and serve up more ham than a Christmas dinner. But, for most of them, it was just another job and, like most non-industry people across the world, they had no real concept of how tedious making TV could be. Into the fourth take of walking into the same shop, or strolling down the street again, they were routinely demanding their money and wanting to go.
With large groups of extras it was like keeping frogs in a box. They would concoct more and more elaborate excuses for nicking off. ‘I have to go to my sister’s wedding/My mother got hit by a car/ My goat fell in the river.’
Or, deciding to simply blow off the big bucks, they’d try to quietly slip away. ‘Aleem!’ I cried in dismay. ‘Where is that man going? The guy in the blue. Chase him! Quickly! We’re losing him!’
Holding them prisoner on set didn’t foster a great deal of enthusiasm for the job, so attempts to make them laugh at the lead actor’s joke, or to look genuinely happy during any type of celebration, were almost pointless.
‘Okay, guys!’ I enthused. ‘We’re going to do that again. Because you need to look excited! Salam has saved the day. Laugh! Smile! Cheer! Okay?’
‘When’s lunch?’ asked one of them plaintively.
Post-lunch was always the worst time on set because, having been fed their beans and rice and been granted the luxury of a can of Coke or Fanta, the extras were often content to forgo their cash payment and escape, happy to have eaten at least one meal that day. Early on we learnt to hold off feeding them for as long as possible.
During the filming of Eagle Four we’d had a particularly big scene. The storyline involved the attempted assassination of the British ambassador and his wife (yours truly) during a stately reception attended by the bigwigs of Afghan society. We had booked out for the day an upmarket local restaurant that normally catered to rich Afghans and westerners. The entire main cast was on set, and we had placed an order with Nangali, our extras wrangler, for thirty people.
As the first of the extras began dribbling in, I almost had a seizure. They were a bedraggled, raggedy, moth-eaten bunch and my guess was that Nangali had dragged most of them in from the shantytown under the Kabul River bridge. We raced around, trying to find decent clothes for them and then arranging them into groups where those facing away from camera were the poor sods who had no teeth or looked as though they might possibly be going through drug withdrawal. We’d pulled in a few expat mates to play foreign dignitaries; one of our leads had brought along a bunch of his university friends who, in their suits and ties and fashionable eyewear, we featured prominently at the front of the throng.
It was the middle of summer and the scene was rather complicated. The smoke machine made everybody cough, the lights made us sweat and after two hours, the extras had uniformly had enough. The promise of lunch after ‘one more take’ was empty and meaningless. There was no way we were going to feed them before two and, when they finally sat down for their lunchtime ‘feast’ just before three, they devoured it like men on the verge of starvation. Which I’m guessing most of them were.
I didn’t eat that day; I was acting as well as working on set, so I spent the break discussing the next set-up with the directors. Mid-discussion, I sensed something was amiss. I turned to notice that a couple of the long dining tables were completely empty and my heart lurched.
I raced to the foyer to find a horde of extras attempting a breakout. I threw myself against the door, demanding that the security guard lock it immediately, before bellowing loudly for back-up. Aleem arrived and tried to quell the uprising with promises of cake and biscuits in a few more hours. As he attempted to calm them and usher them all back to the set, the university posse pulled me aside and pleaded for mercy. One of them explained that he had an exam that afternoon and, after a rigorous interrogation, I agreed that he could go.
He was one of our key featured people-props, and our continuity would be shot, but I couldn’t let the poor kid fail his course for the sake of our show. I decided to sneak him out the back through the kitchen, fearing a stampede if I unlocked the main door. But, as I led him away, his friends suddenly started calling after me, declaring that they too had exams they’d forgotten to mention.
I returned to the group, dragging Exam Guy back with me. ‘All right. I believe that your mate actually does have to attend uni for an exam. I don’t believe the rest of you. You’re all friends, right?’ They nodded. ‘So here’s the deal. If your friend here really does have an exam, you’ll let him go quietly. If you’re going to keep insisting that you all have exams, then the lot of you stay—including him. He misses his exam, he’s facing a problem and it will all be down to you—his friends. Now tell me again: which of you genuinely has an exam today?’
Exam Guy readily raised his hand. The others murmured amongst themselves in Dari for a moment before shaking their heads: No.
Cranky, Bad Arse Western Woman: 1
Bored, Antsy Arts Undergrads: 0
The shoot the previous day in Jalalabad had been ambitious, and had been months in the making; Muffy and our client had attended endless meetings with government officials just to lock in the choppers and get the commandos on board. And because we were shooting in a potentially dangerous area, with the Taliban apparently lurking in the nearby hills, we needed a hundred and thirty Afghan soldiers to secure the location’s perimeter. To add to the enormity of the event, the choppers would only be landing three times, so we had to be on our game.
We’d decided to use six cameras. Truth be told, that’s all we had; one of them would be mounted on a six-metre crane. In the week leading up to the big day our camera trainer, a crusty old German called Luther, held numerous meetings with the crew to go over the shooting plan. We had clashed with Luther on a number of occasions since his arrival at Moby six months before. He had never worked in Afghanistan before and had no real concept of the difficulties involved in making television there. He would blithely pass judgement on our work with no regard for the lack of resources and experience that we had to contend with, and his supreme arrogance as he delivered his various verdicts made me want to slap him.
I had also come to question Luther’s teaching techniques. While we simply wanted him to equip our untrained kids with the basic skills to be able to point the camera in the right direction, focus it, and make the thing go, he was intent on gearing them up to make art-house films worthy of Fellini. Our team often came away from his sessions with more questions than answers.
‘Trudi, Luther asked us what the difference is between fashion and style. What does that mean?’
‘Trudi Jan, what’s a genre?’
‘Trudi Jan, who is Ali Hitchcock?’
His game plan for the Jalalabad shoot was elaborate and complicated and, being the only person on the crew to have ever actually shot at the site, I had serious doubts we could pull it off. The fact that he refused to use his translator during meetings only added to my concern.
He wanted a camera mounted onto a flatbed truck, which was something we didn’t have the budget for and which I was certain would become bogged in the sandy soil. He devised the ingenious plan of wrapping a camera in plastic and burying it in the ground, to capture the feet of the commandos as they ran down the hill—another artistic initiative that I had to firmly nip in the bud. We were short on cameras as it was and, to lose one under a misplaced boot or a
s a result of dirt getting into the casing, would prove to be an immense loss to our department. We finally settled on some kind of compromise that I still wasn’t entirely sold on. At our final briefing, as I tried to make sense of his detailed diagrams, he proffered me a patronising pat on the back and reassured me it would all be okay because he would be personally supervising the team.
Luther pulled out at 10pm on the night before the shoot. The German embassy had advised him that it was unsafe to travel to Jalalabad, and he felt he had no choice but to stay put in Kabul. The fact that his fellow countryman, Willy, the wonderful, laid-back lighting trainer, was coming along, for shits and giggles, failed to convince him otherwise.
It’s fair to say that Jalalabad had turned decidedly nasty in the time since Tiggy, Jose and I first worked there, and the road to the city—a narrow affair that wound its way precariously along the side of a mountain and was regularly targeted by the Taliban—had been voted the most dangerous road in the world. But my feeling was that, when you chose to work in a war zone, you sometimes had to just suck it up, monkey, whatever your misgivings. Particularly when that ‘monkey’ had devised a shooting schedule that involved seventy-two different shots that nobody else could decipher.
We left at dawn to make the three-hour road trip and liaise with our crew. The drive down was breathtaking, although slightly uncomfortable. Due to the fact that we had to take an extra make-up artist with us, I was relegated to the doggy-box in the back of the jeep, and the Afghan security guard stationed beside me kept casually laying his arm across the back of the seat in a bid to cop a feel of my infidel shoulder. If I’d allowed that to happen, it would have been the western equivalent of performing oral sex on the man.
Making Soapies in Kabul Page 13