Making Soapies in Kabul

by Trudi-Ann Tierney

  Nilu had just called a car and we were settling the bill when the first blast rang out. It was close, but not exactly on top of us; nonetheless, the manager herded us all down to one end of the room as everyone hit their phones for intel.

  I had no network coverage, but Nilu managed to speak briefly with her driver—from across the table I could hear gunfire through her phone. Her office, just a few blocks away, was right in the middle of it all; before the line went dead, her driver actually apologised for not being able to pick her up. As a panicked Nilu tried in vain to reconnect, a skinny old Afghan dude in a shiny suit strutted in to where we were sitting and struggled to raise high a rifle circa 1898.

  ‘Everyone will stay here. Nobody can leave,’ he said. Then, heaving the ancient firearm even higher, just in case we hadn’t noticed it: ‘We will all be okay.’

  I seriously doubted Slim’s ability to take on the Taliban, but was quietly happy that I could at least have a drink or seven while we waited it out. But just as I was ordering my traditional neat whisky, my phone sprang into life. It was work, wanting to know where I was. They would send security over to bring me back to the office.

  Slim was crushed to be losing two of his charges but, with Nilu in tow, the guards raced me across the street. The gunfire seemed to be everywhere and we both covered our heads with our hands, in some insane but instinctive bid to fend off any stray bullets.

  Our protectors deposited us into the first building inside our gate, which houses our sales and marketing team. There was no safe room there, just a basement stacked high with water bottles and stationery. Only ten people could actually fit in there, while everyone else snaked up the stairwell and spilled out into the glass-fronted foyer. In two seconds flat, we’d had enough of that fruitless caper, plus there was no phone coverage in the bowels of the building and Nilu was anxious to check on her team.

  So she and I made our way upstairs, sticking our heads out the door along the way so I could partake of a soothing cigarette, before landing in Eric’s office. Eric was our head of sales and marketing—a loud, jolly New Yorker who was constantly wired. He told us there had been coordinated attacks across the city, but the main threat now was a group of militants who had made their way into a nearby building under construction and were firing on the presidential palace, various ministry buildings and several western embassies. It was a similar scenario to last September’s siege and we knew it could rage on for hours.

  ‘Oh boy, ladies! Hee, hee, hee! Looks like we’re in for a long afternoon. Hee, hee, hee!’ Eric exclaimed.

  He was compiling a ‘Terrorist Attack’ playlist on his computer, which included such gems as ‘Hate & War’ by The Clash and U2’s ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’. He didn’t know ‘Everybody Wants to Rule the World’ by Tears for Fears, but I assured him it was appropriate.

  Nilu switched the television over to her channel to try and get an update. She gasped as she viewed vision of her building—the stairwell on her floor was filled with rubble. ‘Oh God no. God no . . .’ she cried, as she tried once again to get someone on the line.

  I tried to ring Muffy, who was meant to be flying out on leave that day. Her grandfather was dying in Los Angeles and her departure was time-sensitive. I finally got through on the fifth attempt. She and Eugene were together in the new safe room on the other side of the street. Because nobody knew where the key was, it had taken them twenty minutes to get inside. When the key was finally located (it was across the road, with the head of finance), they opened the door to find the room full of boxes of merchandise. And just a moment ago one of the security guards, morally affronted by the men and women all packed inside in such close proximity, had ushered all the local girls out again.

  I could only laugh. If I’d let the security situation bother me, my tiny head would have exploded. And, despite now having found out that her colleagues were safe, I doubted poor Nilu was up for that.

  Following the last big attack in September 2011, when my kids had stood outside sipping tea as bullets whizzed overhead, a handful of expats and I had taken it upon ourselves to sort things out. Patrick and David, who worked in business development, were both ex-military while I simply fancied being part of an exciting, strategic mission that would take me away from my desk for a few hours.

  So one afternoon, Ahmad and I had trailed David around the place. I made notes and took photos as he pointed out security concerns and earmarked areas that could be used as safe rooms. I snapped away at broken latches on security gates, at basements being used as storage facilities, at rubbish-filled escape routes. Also low walls where ladders could be placed to lead us to safety.

  I set it all out in a document and sent it to Dubai. To be fair, they responded rather quickly. A week later we had a siren installed in our compound that would signal us all to move to our safe area at the rear of the building. A drill was held that very same day. We all dutifully shuffled to the designated zone and hung around for a bit, not seeing the point of it really, as they hadn’t yet installed the security grille on the door.

  Ahmad also mounted a demonstration on how to use the fire extinguishers. He lit a fire in a bin, using gasoline to get it going. But then he discovered that the fire extinguisher was empty. A guard had to race around to the back of the building and grab a hose to put out the huge flames.

  Still, over the next few weeks basements were cleared, first-aid kits were purchased and drills were conducted. And yet here we were, six months later in the midst of another attack, with no proper safe rooms to go to.

  We all had to take responsibility for letting things lapse. I had been to the safe room on the other side of the street a dozen times since it was first cleared out, foraging through the jumble of boxes to collect T-shirts, stickers and DVDs, with no thought of reporting its dire condition to management. The first-aid kit in our building had been used as a prop on one of our shoots and was still sitting in a corner of our office minus bandages, Band-Aids and antiseptic cream. And poor old Ahmad had lost his initial enthusiasm for holding regular safety drills when people (myself included) simply failed to show up.

  As for my Afghan friends, I had come to the conclusion that they were so accustomed to death that the thought of attempting to stave it off just didn’t even occur to them. The simple truth was, we didn’t spend our days waiting for the next bomb to go off.

  By late afternoon on the day of the April attack, Muffy was still unsure as to whether she’d be able to fly out; the airport was open but she was told that she may not be able to get there. Having been in a similar situation with my mum, I felt her pain.

  She finally managed to escape in a high-speed operation worthy of a Bond film. The guards allowed me into the car park for a brief goodbye, before she was spirited away. She went up and over Russian Swimming Pool Hill, where she was hurried into another waiting vehicle and then driven through the backwaters of Kabul, all the time being admonished by her driver for looking too western in her over-sized sunnies and with her visible blonde fringe. I’m guessing that her pale skin might have been the real giveaway. I was evacuated soon after and sat with my housemates in our compound, slurping on our drinks as the thunder of battle rolled all around us.

  The next morning my phone woke me at 6am. It was Christof, telling me to stay home from work and to advise my team to do the same. When I asked him why, he positively squealed before marvelling at how I could not possibly know that the siege was still in full swing, seventeen hours after it had begun.

  I had apparently slept through most of it. I had also slept through a missed call and three text messages from our house manager, Adiba. Because there was gunfire nearby, she advised us to stay away from the windows, to remain inside, and to come to the safe room if we were concerned. I also snoozed away soundly as a couple of panicked souls flapped around the compound for most of the night, certain we were being attacked. You’ve gotta love a Valium.

  About an hour after Christof’s call, the Afghan Security Forces took out the
last of the insurgents and our management in Dubai had a change of heart. They decided that we could go to work after all, and HR advised us via email that we should make our way to the office as soon as possible. I had already spoken by then with Merzad, the first link in my chain of command; when I told him to remain at home, he promptly informed me that he fully intended to. He hadn’t slept all night and, besides, his father wouldn’t allow him to leave the house.

  So I responded to Dubai, informing them that my team would not be reporting for duty. I ended with my usual sign-off in such situations: You guys have no idea what we’ve been through over here! Their standard apology and backpedalling reply (always quite genuine) arrived in my inbox five minutes later.

  It was towards the end of May 2012 that I had to perform the most difficult work-related task I had undertaken: I had to tell Muffy that her contract wasn’t being renewed. Unbeknownst to her, Christof and I had been fighting to save her for almost a month, but, with a couple of lucrative projects either falling through or hanging in the balance, Dubai had finally decided that it was too costly to keep her on.

  I cried when Christof and Shaikh, our head of HR, broke the news to me just after lunch. My tears were for myself as much as for her. I was not only losing my best friend, but also my most loyal work ally. I selfishly weighed up the myriad jobs I would now need to take on; I anticipated the workplace battles I would have to fight alone.

  This wasn’t the first time that Muffy’s job had been on the line. Soon after Christof started with the company, he tried to oust her. He wanted to employ a guy called AK, who on paper presented as an experienced and competent director but certainly not as a supervising producer. The idea was ill conceived and grossly unfair to Muffy, and I threatened to resign in order to keep her.

  When AK finally did join our team as a director a few months after this failed coup, he was stunned that he had even been considered for Muffy’s job. He declared that he’d rather spend his days stabbing himself in the eye with a pencil than be tied to a desk, tackling her complex, Excel-heavy workload.

  But in this current climate I feared that any dramatic threats on my behalf to resign might possibly be welcomed. News Corp had become a minor shareholder in the company earlier in the year; in the lead-up to that deal, new accounting systems were introduced requiring strict time-keeping practices and tighter control of expenditure. We all sat through a raft of mandatory meetings where fresh policies and procedures for the company were outlined.

  Since then there had been a number of redundancies and an inevitable, commonsense shift towards transitioning Afghan staff into key managerial positions. Hey, I could have been wrong, but I sensed that the trimming of a relatively fat expat wage bill may have been viewed as a fiscal blessing.

  I delivered the news to Muffy, who was out on a shoot, over the phone. That was not because I wanted to but because, when I called to tell her to return to the office, she immediately asked me what was wrong. She told me the arrival of Shaikh that morning on the first flight from Dubai had had everyone on edge.

  ‘They’re letting you go, sweetheart.’ Hoarse and raw, my words caught in my throat.

  But Muffy didn’t cry. I think she knew it was coming, and this had manifested itself in her own longing to leave. Her sigh by way of reply signalled a release from months of indecision and angst.

  Since early April she and I had been living together in a small villa at our new guest house. I struggled to remember a morning when she hadn’t woken up crying or complaining of a sleepless night. Two years of incredibly demanding slog and hard living had exhausted her, while the recent cancellation of her lifestyle show—a popular program that was just finding its feet—had crushed her.

  We decided to tell our team that she was jumping of her own accord because any suggestion that she was pushed would inevitably cause an angry uprising. Even so, she would have to endure a month of disappointed and disheartened people, from producers to security guards, asking her why—and begging her to change her mind.

  From soon after her arrival, she and I had been known (affectionately, I think) around the traps as The Drama Queens. But in a matter of weeks The Drama Queens would be no more and that night we sat together on our private terrace, with generous G & Ts in our hands, trying to come to terms with it. There were tears, laughter, and a mixture of both, as we recalled our shared adventure.

  Muffy arrived on the scene in early 2010 bristling with brio, determination and great plans for revolutionising the drama department. She quickly sized up my mental state and assessed me as ‘defeated’, and I couldn’t convince her that I had simply become a realist.

  I had squared off with management countless times over equipment, staffing levels and budgets; I had made erudite and reasonable arguments to back my various requests for a new monitor, an extra producer or an increased food allowance for my hungry crew. But I didn’t always win, simple as that, and I eventually learnt to choose my battles wisely.

  I had worked hard to earn the respect of my colleagues and to establish myself as a fair, albeit no-nonsense, boss, but for some people I was always going to be an invader—unwanted and disrespected for being a foreigner or a female, or both. What Muffy read as defeat was nothing more than acceptance, but she just wasn’t buying it.

  Shielded by naivety and armed with passion, she became a true soldier of production, crusading for causes that I wasn’t even prepared to gear up for. Her battle fatigue set in after about six months, but during that time we enjoyed the spoils of some extraordinary and unexpected victories. Even after she laid down her arms, she refused to completely surrender.

  Management’s reluctance to sign off on much-needed equipment for Eagle Four saw her develop into a master negotiator. Tired old warrior that I had become, I would probably have agreed to shoot the show on a mobile phone, but she traded microphones for lights, sacrificed part of our wardrobe budget for make-up and orchestrated a last-minute deal to get Damian, our director of photography, on board.

  I may have been captain of the ship, but it was so often my trusty first mate who kept us afloat. And that night, commiserating together after the news she would be leaving us, we traded war stories like the seasoned campaigners we had become. We struggled to recall a time when we had ever really fallen out, but then Muffy reminded me of a day in January 2011 when I had literally shaken her and screamed in her face. Indeed I had been an ogre, but we agreed she had had it coming . . .

  We had just relocated to yet another guest house. It was about my sixth move and Muffy’s third—we had been forced to find new digs when our previous house had shut up shop. We settled on the place because it had a bar, a squash court and a so-so menu. It was a huge, two-storey complex—hospital-like in appearance, complete with fluorescent strip lighting, linoleum floors and wide, empty corridors.

  But the rooms resembled poorly decorated sets for a seventies porn film. The walls were covered in easy-wipe, pebble-textured plasterboard, which was festooned with bold geometric shapes. I had red triangles on a sky-blue background that clashed spectacularly with my shiny purple bedspread. The carpet was a mustard short-shag pile, the cupboards boasted a faux-teak veneer, and it was going to take tremendous effort and creativity to transform my garish boudoir into some semblance of a home.

  During the course of our first week there I had hung a few pictures, draped a scarf or two over furnishings, and purchased a lamp for my bedside table, but the light globes I had bought were the wrong type. I considered mounting a shopping expedition to buy new ones on my Friday off but, as Muffy was heading out to the ISAF markets (a monthly bazaar held at the Headquarters of the International Security Assistance Force where Afghan women could sell their wares) I asked her to stop by the western supermarket, Finest, to pick them up.

  I was pottering around in my room just after lunch when I received a text. Amy had managed to get me on to her company’s security alert list, back when I first met her in Jalalabad, and it was usually through this that
I got the first indication something had gone awry. The message was scant on details, simply stating that there had been an explosion at the Finest supermarket in Wazir Akbar Khan.

  I immediately called our go-to man at work, Akmal, to see if he could enlighten me. He couldn’t, but promised to talk to Ahmad and get back to me.

  Then I tried to call Muffy. On my first attempt, her phone simply rang out. When I tried again, an Afghan man answered, barked briefly down the line and hung up.

  My stomach dropped a little then, as I began to entertain the awful possibility that Muffy had somehow been caught up in whatever had gone down at Finest. But then Akmal phoned me back, informing me that it had been a gas explosion, nobody had been hurt and that there was nothing to worry about.

  At worst, Muffy had lost her phone or had it stolen, but she is notorious for misplacing things, so I wasn’t greatly surprised or terribly concerned. I tried to phone her one more time for good measure, but when the Afghan man answered again, I hung up, thinking I’d wander downstairs a little later and get one of the waiters to speak with him.

  The hint of an attack made me realise that I hadn’t yet devised a security strategy for my new home. I was just attempting to stuff myself into the cupboard under the sink when my phone rang.

  It was Hamish. ‘Sweetheart, where are you? Are you okay?’

  ‘I’m home, I’m fine. Why?’

  ‘You know there’s been an attack on Finest.’

  ‘Work said it was a gas explosion.’

  ‘It was insurgents. Nine people are already confirmed dead. Is Muffy with you?’

  I had to sit down.

  ‘No. I’ve been trying to call her but some Afghan man keeps answering.’

  ‘Same here. I just tried calling again and her phone’s now switched off.’