A Foreign Affair

by Stella Russell

  I gestured to him to toss me a cigarette. On the whole, I don’t smoke for fear of my lips ever resembling a cat’s anus, as Fiona’s are already showing signs of doing after years of pursing them at me, but there’s always been the odd occasion. Ummmm, I inhaled luxuriantly, as a plan of the day’s action began to form in my mind. By the time Aziz got off his phone, I was ready to issue some instructions, but he had a question:

  ‘You are leaving so soon, Madam Roza?’ he asked, pointing at my suitcase.

  ‘Only this place. I’m a sitting duck for any stray bin Baddy with a bomb in there – they’ve been attacked three times,’ I answered him breezily, ‘It’s the Sheraton for me tonight! Now, could you just…’

  Staggering under its weight, Aziz heaved my case into the back of the car. I hadn’t wanted to tackle the task myself because I was wearing a carefully tailored cream shalwar kameez that I’d had run up for me somewhere off Brick Lane, some gold suede mules and a matching scarf draped over my blond curls in that loosely romantic style the late Benazir Bhutto always favoured. A pair of gold rimmed aviator-style sunglasses by Chanel completed a look I imagined could have passed for that of a visiting princess from one of the more westernised Gulf states – Kuwait, Qatar, or Bahrain perhaps.

  ‘Do I look all right, Aziz?’ I was fishing for the sort of compliment a beautiful woman only hears from gay men.

  ‘Believe me, Madam Roza, you are another Queen of Sheba!’ he answered obligingly.

  ‘I don’t think so! Only one queen around here!’ I quipped back but he didn’t hear over the noise of air-conditioning. I decided to drop it. Somewhere I’d heard that in countries like Yemen one can’t assume people have even seen the closet, let alone considered opening it or stepping out. By the end of my week among the Yemenis, I would have discovered, to my considerable personal discomfort, that they punish homosexuality with death, but I’m getting way ahead of myself now… ‘Aziz, how long will it take us to get to Silent Valley and back?’

  ‘Certainly no more than an hour, Madam Roza.’

  ‘Fine. Let’s head there first while it’s still cool, and then it’ll be straight to the Sheraton to check in, have a nice swim and a drink before a decent lunch. Does that sound like a good plan of action?’

  ‘Yes, Madam Roza, it does and much more interesting than my usual work. Most days there is nothing for me to do because no ships are visiting Aden. What a curse is this al-Qaeda! They have ruined everything for us with their evil craziness!’

  ‘But can’t you find a more interesting job? Your English is good.’

  ‘Perhaps it is hard for you to understand Madam Roza, but in this so-called Republic of Yemen I am a privileged and lucky person just because I am a civil servant with a salary and a pension, thanks to my father. I can feed my family –

  ‘What family?’

  ‘My two wives and five children, two boys and three girls.’

  ‘Really?’ I changed the subject, ‘Now, I understand I need some sort of permit from the tourist police?’

  Striking himself on the forehead three times in a theatrical fashion, Aziz swung the car around in a screeching U turn, narrowly missing a couple of shaven-headed schoolboys kicking a Coke can along the road, and we headed straight back in the direction we’d come, towards the offices of the Tourist Police.

  He escorted me up to an office on the first floor of a sadly dilapidated old colonial building that he explained had been a boarding school for the sons of tribal sheikhs in colonial times. Fearing for my cream get-up and golden mules amid the filth of the ancient linoleum floor and fly-specked overhead fans, I nevertheless extended my hand politely to an ancient Tourist Police chief sitting at a desk strewn with dusty manila envelopes and unwashed tea glasses. I also accepted a seat in a sweat-stained armchair and another cigarette. On the wall facing me, behind the old man’s head, was a touched-up photograph of a very young queen – pale-skinned, ruby-lipped and coltish in yellow sling-backs, sleeveless cotton frock and white gloves - dubbing some uncomfortably crouching Yemeni a worthy knight of the Empire.

  Our chat went well. I was English and, although he’d been one of those involved in taking up arms to eject us Brits in the mid-1960s, he greatly admired what he called my ‘masterful race’. While my lack of a valid Yemeni visa was irregular and even regrettable, he assured me that it was not the end of the world. Recent orders received from ‘those barbarians up in Sanaa’, he explained, strictly forbade foreign visitors to leave the city by car on account of a heightened risk of being abducted and beheaded by ‘brainless fanatics’, in the manner of two luckless Luxembourgeoises whose safe despatch back to Europe in body-bags he had himself overseen a week earlier. But such things happened, didn’t they, wherever one happened to live – Madrid, London, Bali…. And anyway, who was he to follow the orders of the northern barbarians ‘like a slave’? Who was he to detain a member of my ‘masterful race’ one moment longer with ‘petty prohibitions’? Filling in the requisite passe partout with what looked like a 1950s Parker pen and a defiant flourish, he posed me a final rhetorical but also philosophical question: ‘Are we not all of us born to be free?’ I quite agreed with him and, for the second time in as many hours, felt a wave of joy surge through me. My Flashman soul was soaring.

  The old fellow was not quite done with me. Rising to his feet with a little grunt and laying one hand over his heart as if he were taking an oath of loyalty, he began to address me in a style that matched his pen while glancing at a file that might have been chewed by a goat before being dunked in the sea and dried in the sun:

  ‘My dear Lady, I believe that Allah has sent you – the only British tourist Aden has seen for more than a year, according to my records here – because this poor south Yemen needs you! I pray you, be so kind as to convey to Her Majesty at the earliest possible opportunity the most sincere loyalty and respect of all of us here.’ Like a schoolmaster having recourse to a visual aid, he swivelled on his heel to rap at the picture of our juvenile monarch with the butt of his Parker pen, before going on, ‘And I beg you, do not omit to impress upon her the extent and severity of our suffering under the boot of this northern barbarian.’ With another rap of his Parker, he indicated a smaller portrait photograph of the northerner tribesman Aziz had called ‘the chief of all the robbers’, which was hanging slightly lower and to the left of the Queen.

  ‘It will give me the greatest pleasure to do as you ask,’ I replied, in as close an approximation to the queen’s voice as I could manage, extending my hand to him again to bow over respectfully. Playing the part of a stiff-necked, lion-hearted daughter of the Empire was still coming astonishingly easily to me.

  That meeting only improved my excellent spirits. As I picked my way back down a lethally creaky staircase, past a flotsam of empty cigarette packets and plastic water bottles, through drifts of sunflower seed husks and discarded plastic qat bags, it occurred to me that people in this sadly squalid corner of the world seemed to have been watching and waiting for someone like me. There was no longer a nano-particle of doubt in my mind that I’d landed in the right place at the right time to accomplish something or other. What precisely that something was would be revealed in good time, I felt sure.

  Aziz and I were on the road again, headed west, gliding round roundabouts, past Crater and out along a causeway with a ravishing view of paddling pink flamingos on our right, towards a much less ravishing oil refinery that the British had built and the Marxists had failed to maintain. We cleared a police checkpoint on the edge of town without incident thanks to Aziz chucking the single teenage conscript on duty at that unearthly hour of the morning a twig or two of wilted qat and a dollar bill. I recognised the name Sheikh Othman on a vintage bi-lingual road sign. It was still only 9am; the whole day lay ahead of us.

  We must have been no more than fifteen minutes short of our destination, quite alone except for the odd speeding pick-up truck transporting the daily supplies of qat safely to market under a flapping blue tarpauli
n, on a good open road that led as straight as a die through a parched russet Mars-scape towards a range of jagged black mountains rising some way up ahead of us, when disaster struck.

  It transpired that the LandCruiser was not as roadworthy as Aziz had claimed. He’d failed to notice that it was thirsty. A haze of radiator steam had begun to blur our view of the road ahead. When we stopped to let the engine cool sufficiently to be able to give the poor machine a drink, and at last risked unscrewing the radiator cap, a jet of high-pressure steam erupted from it, scalding one of Aziz’s chubby cheeks and melting one arm of his Raybans. The radiator fractured like a boiling egg, but with a sickening series of cracks, like pistol shots.

  Aziz was distraught. The car was not his. It belonged to his father who, although not a ‘northern barbarian’, was nevertheless a regime big-wig who lived up in Sanaa, among those barbarians. He had received the car as a kind of ‘welcome to my band of thieves’ present from the president himself and would surely return to Aden and throttle Aziz the instant he discovered the very serious damage to his favourite toy with its walnut dashboard and leather seats. He had always preferred Aziz’s brother to him and from the day Aziz was born had referred to him as the Arab equivalent of a big girl’s blouse and still mocked the size of his penis, and so on and on….

  I wasn’t in any mood to listen to all this but what could I do? We were sitting side by side in what little remained of the air-conditioned cool, hoping against hope, minute after interminable minute that another qat pick-up would appear and its driver be good enough to stop and run Aziz back to Sheikh Othman where he could arrange for the LandCruiser to be towed back to Aden and beg, steal or borrow another vehicle to rejoin me. We decided – or rather, I decided, since Aziz was far too distressed to think straight – that as soon as another car hove into view we would flag it down and set our plan in motion. I would remain in the LandCruiser with all the doors locked and wait for him to collect me so that we could continue towards our destination.

  The plan was a good one. Everything came to pass just as I’d envisaged, until I’d been sitting alone there in the car for about twenty minutes, flicking though a copy of Vogue I’d retrieved from my treasure chest and snacking on the single serving of Rice Krispies I’d pinched from the Revs. Then, a battered red pick-up carrying a large load of cardboard boxes improbably emblazoned with the logo Dolce & Gabbana, came hurtling towards me. Two heavily bearded young men, both of them dressed in those elongated shirts Moslem men tend to wear in places like Shepherds Bush and Finsbury Park, and pink and green checked headcloths, and both of them with guns slung on straps over their shoulders like handbags, hopped out to assess the situation by peering in though the smoked glass of my passenger window.

  ‘Allahu Akhbar!’ they exclaimed delightedly over the walnut dashboard and leather seats, more awed and thrilled by the car’s luxury interior than they were by the sight of me. Unfazed at finding the car doors locked against them, they shouted at each other for a moment before fetching a tow-rope from the pick-up and hooking it to the LandCruiser. Indicating to me that I should get behind the wheel, release the handbrake and prepare to steer, they jumped back in their jalopy and we were off. I’d not been behind a wheel for years and enjoyed it, no matter that I was being towed, no matter that I might have been steering towards my doom. Soon, I was rising to the additional challenge of piloting the vehicle down a rocky track that led away from the main road, in the direction of those forbiddingly black mountains.

  Had I fallen into the evil clutches of some Islamists who would despatch me with a single Allahu Akhbar!? Or, by any bizarre chance, could these handsome lads be a pair of top-end fashion salesmen with a valuable consignment of Dolce & Gabbana to shift? Might they not simply have felt duty-bound to suspend their normal activity in order to come to the aid of a very well turned-out foreign female?

  Chapter Four

  I’ve heard that when faced with any humdrum conundrum, American Bible Belt Christians just ask themselves a simple question: What would Jesus do? – WWJD for short. Whenever I’m in trouble, I tend to ask myself WWFHD? What would Flashman have done?

  The short answer is always the same: nothing that entails any obvious physical danger. Certainly, there were several good reasons for not hurling myself out of my moving vehicle, rolling over and over in the dust and rocks and hoping my abductors wouldn’t notice I’d gone. For a start, there was still a chance that I was perfectly safe, with nothing to fear from two Yemeni designer rag-traders. Second, it would have been a shame to ruin my outfit. Third, I hated the idea of being parted from my wheelie case but fourth, and perhaps most importantly, the oddly exalted state of my soul at that moment meant I was feeling more confident and optimistic than I had for a long time.

  If my daily drudgery at the Daily Register had bored me, my straitened circumstances as a weekly boarder in a family home of a school friend in Highgate and as an unwanted visitor with Ralph and Fiona at Widderton most weekends, had distressed and depressed me. The fact was, as Fiona never tired of pointing out to me, I had only myself to blame for my woes having wasted three whole years worth of family trust fund money on bankrolling a friend’s attempt to interest the Chinese in white-knuckle water sports. Quite simply, I was enjoying the sensation of having regained my mojo far too much to succumb to pessimism, let alone panic, on that first morning in Yemen.

  We bumped along a rough track in that strangely umbilical manner for almost an hour. My stomach was rumbling, sweat coursing down my back and cleavage and my bladder protesting when I spotted a distant sign of human habitation at last: a five-storey high-rise in the same Martian russet shade as the surrounding landscape. As we approached I was able to make out a few outbuildings fashioned of the same mud bricks but roofed with corrugated iron. Some scrawny chickens pecked about in the dust, pursued by a pair of almost naked little boys.

  Those children and the appearance of a young woman at the mud castle’s entrance as we crunched to a halt at last were reassuring. Still more so the fact that she was dressed in a curve-enhancing red evening dress, with a solid golden chain belt slung around her hips, magenta plastic sandals on her dusty feet, and what looked like the lumpy mess of a face pack adorning her cheeks, chin and forehead. Surely, I reasoned carefully, if my abductors were authentic, dyed-in-the-wool al-Qaeda types, they’d be down on her like a ton of (mud) bricks for displaying herself so wantonly before the eyes of a strange Infidel? I could feel the tension drain out of my shoulders and relaxed with the happy thought that she must be the lucky recipient of any amount of desirable designer-wear courtesy of her salesmen kinsmen. Could that tomato creation be the glorious Valentino I’d spotted in my Vogue?

  I was on the point of unlocking the doors and jumping out to greet the elegant chatelaine before discreetly miming my need to use her loo – a slight bend of the knees, almost a curtsey, and a ladylike pissing sound would get my message across, I’d decided – when I was forced to reconsider. My abductors, joined by four more equally hirsute young men, were removing the D&G boxes from the back of the pick-ups. It seemed to me that either they were extraordinarily feeble, or there was something much, much heavier than designer fashion in those boxes.

  Yes, indeed.

  Two were now tearing open the largest of the boxes. One plucked out a shiny new rifle, settled its stock on his shoulder, wiped his sweaty face with one of the ends of his checked head cloth, squinted through the gun’s sights and took aim at a passing bird, guffawing because his weapon wasn’t loaded. Another was training his gun’s sights on a scurrying hen, while another fired straight at the head of a little boy who screamed with delight before scampering off to torture a chicken. There was a joyous pop-pop-popping of gunshot all around me. One of my abductors even took aim and fired at me where I still sat in the driving seat of the LandCruiser.

  Another large box turned out to contain hand grenades, which they encouraged the children to toss around like jugglers’ balls. Yet another was filled with gre
nade launcher tubes, a few of which the little boys, - now joined by more boys of around seven and some girls of approximately ten - enjoyed trying to force chickens along in a race to see which would emerge first at the other ends. I was actually enjoying the scene. In fact, I was so involved in the chickens’ dead heat emergence from their metal tubes that I didn’t notice the young chatelaine approaching my vehicle with a cup of water. ‘Ahlan wa sahlan!’, was what she said once I’d released the locks and opened the car door. I assumed she was saying ‘Welcome’ so managed a polite ‘Shukran!’ in return. I then framed my urgent need for a lavatory in the way I’d pre-planned and was instantly rewarded with a sympathetic grin. A roll of her eyes in the direction of her menfolk clearly communicated, ‘What are they like?!’ Shepherding me towards a tiny shed behind the castle, she introduced herself as Fatima and giggled as she practised repeating my name, reaching up to finger my blond hair admiringly and demanding that I let her try on my mules.

  The inside of that privy was hellish, its air fetid and black with flies. Obliged to crouch low to perform my bodily function, I ran the horrifying gauntlet of an army of bugs erupting from the hole beneath me. Instead of loo-paper, there was a plastic bucket of water and a small pink plastic jug which I deployed fairly efficiently. Unable to hang around in that noxious cess-shed while waiting to dry off, I re-emerged, commanding myself to keep calm. After all, nothing I’d seen thus far, bar a good deal of facial hair, suggested that my abductors were Moslem fanatics with my decapitation on their minds. Most likely, they were simple, common or garden arms smugglers who wished me no ill and had abducted me to their homestead as an exotic surprise for their women and children.