A Foreign Affair

by Stella Russell

  Some of you will ask how I was able to appreciate those gelati hues when the windows of the LandCruiser were blacked out; for your information, my friendly heavy had asked me to open my window because he was feeling a little carsick. If you’re also wondering why I have nothing to say on the subject of the female northern Yemeni, allow me to point out that they are more covered even than most of their southern Yemeni sisters; only their eyes show above those little face aprons, though they dispense with the gloves and thick socks those Hadrami witches affected. I dare say that in their own way they are all as elegantly proportioned and attractive as their menfolk, but I had no way of knowing for sure and, naturally enough, no great interest in finding out.

  The point I’m seeking to make here, is that Yemen is at least as much about fashion and flair as it is about bin Baddies, and I was impressed to see that its handsome pint-sized president was leading from the front. Billboard after billboard, poster in shop window after poster in shop window showed him in a variety of elegant ensembles: grey-haired and avuncular in a tweed sports jacket and half-moon spectacles, fiercely romantic in head cloth, brocade belt and jambiyah etc., stern as a statue in a military uniform hung with medals, businesslike in suit, white shirt and silver tie, and so on.

  We came to a halt at last in a wide street that was doubling up as a market place to judge by the small army of young men busily spreading their wares on their tarpaulin pitches. I saw floral displays of padded bras, beside a heap of hairbrushes, a hill of potatoes and leaning towers of tin cooking pots. If it hadn’t been quite so forbiddingly shiny and black, the building we parked in front of could have passed for a luxury hotel or some provincial German town’s Rathaus; it had boxes of pink and red geraniums and elegantly chained bollards to section it off from the rest of the street. A pair of sleepy young guards in blue camouflage, with guns slung over their shoulders, flanked its revolving smoked glass entranceway.

  ‘Where are we?’ I asked.

  ‘This, Madam, is our brand new Centre for Logistics against International Terror in Yemen. The Americans who paid for it to be set up after 9/11 call it CLIT for short.’

  I didn’t even try suppressing a giggle but then sobered up fast, with a start: ‘Why have you brought me here, for heaven’s sake? No one thinks I’ve got up to anything with bin Laden’s lot, do they?’

  ‘It is not for me to say, Madam,’ said my heavy, helping me out of the LandCruiser, handling my pink Puma bag for me as carefully as Bush’s minder would the nuclear briefcase, ‘but it’s possible. It might interest you to know that the Americans think most of our “terrorists” come from the south of the country so they believe that any movement to separate south from north again must be part of an al-Qaeda strategy to take control of south Yemen.’

  My high spirits nosedived. I now gathered that I was under arrest on suspicion of plotting Islamist terror as well as fomenting south Yemeni secessionism and trashing a luxury car. I dropped a little kiss on my St Serafim of Sarov icon and sent up a silent prayer: ‘Please, St Serafim, If you could just see your way to exploding Aziz’s father’s vehicle on his commute to work this morning…’

  My friendly minder escorted me past the sleepy guards, through the revolving glass door and into a high atrium hallway in which a twice life-size oil painting of the president mounted on a richly caparisoned chestnut steed occupied an entire wall. Grateful for any relief from contemplating the danger I was in, I relished the chance of a closer view gained from the glass box of a lift that was whisking us up and past it, on our way to the top floor. The mighty leader’s riding costume consisted of a navy-blue lounge suit, tie, aviator sunglasses and cowboy boots.

  In a third floor office, a squat and sturdy secretary draped in a black balto, with only her spectacled eyes on show, rose from behind a desk on which there was nothing but a tea glass and a computer screen, no keyboard. Smiling - I could only be sure she was smiling because creases had appeared at the sides of her eyes - she invited me to be seated in a squashy leatherette armchair, before turning to converse with my companion in Arabic.

  ‘I must leave you here now,’ he told me when they’d finished. Carefully stowing my precious bag beside me, he briefed me: ‘The chief is already at his desk and will see you in a few minutes. I have asked Nur here to look after you.’

  Damn you, St Serafim! I panicked suddenly, Just one little drone would have done the trick! Hampered as I was by my handcuffs, I nevertheless made a clumsy grab for the hem of my friendly heavy’s futa, tumbling out of my armchair onto the floor in the process, banging an elbow against a lamp-stand. ‘I desperately need the loo,’ I pleaded, ‘and can’t I have a coffee? So much for Yemeni hospitality!’

  ‘Madam, I regret to have to remind you that you are not a guest in our country. You are a suspected criminal and under arrest,’ he said, gently but firmly prising his futa from my grip. My memory may be playing tricks on me, but I could swear the area around the Ninja’s eyes sprouted a fresh crop of cruelly sadistic creases. ‘You must try to understand that your position is not a comfortable one,’ he continued, ‘if I were you…’

  It had taken me a while – those cheerful boxes of geraniums out front had misled me - but at last I sensed that CLIT’s prevailing atmosphere was grim, bordering on the sinister. Cattle prods, electrodes, instruments of water torture, pliers, interrogation lamps, began inching across the front of my mind like prizes on The Generation Game’s conveyor belt. I could now easily imagine that the basement of that shiny fortress contained political prisoners, each in dank, airless solitary confinement, and that its strip-lit corridors regularly echoed with the strangled screams and groans of prisoners having information extracted from them. My erstwhile friend was still speaking:

  ‘…and he is not a man to disrespect so do not talk too much and do not try to argue with him. I must go now.’

  ‘But I’ll start screaming if you won’t let me apply some lipstick!’ I wailed, ‘In the name of your Allah the Merciful take off these handcuffs for a minute, only a minute! Please!’

  With Nur’s assistance and the heavy’s translation the pink Puma bag was opened, rifled through, and the right lipstick – my favourite, Dior’s Rose Shocking – extracted. My heavy cautiously escorted me over to the mirror behind Nur’s desk before daring to undo my handcuffs. No sooner had he done so than I seized my chance. Like a woman possessed I swivelled 180 degrees away from the mirror and kneed him in the groin. Crumpling, he slumped to the floor, his eyes rolling back in his head. A wide and lightning swing of my right fist – containing Rose Shocking’s lethal metal bullet-casing, of course - took care of Nur, her glasses and her face apron. In my last glimpse of her she was sprawled across her empty desk, her face apron awry, her bared face jammed up hard against that computer screen. As I yanked open the door into the corridor, I heard footsteps approaching on the other side of the door leading into the chief’s office. Not a second to lose!

  No time to wait for the lift. I resorted to an old skill I’d kept honed since childhood thanks to Widderton Hall’s grand Queen Anne staircase. As fast as an Olympic bob-sleigher, I slid down three floors’ worth of banister, thanking St Serafim for the fact that the banister was an ideally smooth plastic. I went like the wind, as fast as I would have done on polished oak. My spectacular schoolgirl stunt so surprised and delighted the uniformed guards on the ground floor, they laughed and shouted Yella! Yella! instead of raising their rifles and taking aim. ‘Ma salaama! Bye-bye!’ I shouted back, racing towards the revolving door, a dancing sunbeam in my primrose yellow kaftan. The revolving door would slow me down but so what? None of those laughing boys was about to cut short my escape by shooting me in the back. Thanks a million, St Serafim! But I’d prayed too soon. I was still in the revolving door when I noticed that its other half contained Sheikh Ahmad, handcuffed, dishevelled, and escorted by four armed guards.

  My need to be with the man I loved was as reflex and urgent an imperative as a desire to vomit or hiccough. It was
as if all my entrails - bladder, uterus, oesophagus and stomach - had suddenly traded places with the contents of my head. What dangerous nonsense the Ancients and Romantics preach about love! Love doesn’t conquer all. Love marvellously, magically, muddles all. In helpless thrall to it, I turned my back on my only slim chance of freedom by performing another 180 degree turn in that revolving door to arrive back in the lobby.

  ‘Oh Rozzer,’ said my sheikh, that familiar old expression of amused surprise in his liquorice drop eyes, as he sweetly tucked a stray tendril of hair back behind my ear. ‘It has happened as I warned you it might. I’m very, very sorry – but why have you come back?’

  This was no time for beating about the bush: ‘Why do you think? Because I love you, of course!’ I blurted.

  Shaking his head and widening his eyes, he looked as if he didn’t believe what his ears had relayed to him, ‘Dear Rozzer, you have timing,’ he said. He proffered a corner of his head cloth to mop up my tears and, seeing me make such a clumsy job of it, performed the task himself in the same manner as that in which he’d arranged my headscarf for me in the car park at Mukalla airport. I cried some more but giggled too, as delighted as ever just to be with him.

  All around us, in a circle, the dozen or so guards had assumed the fondly foolish expressions of guests at a wedding, but I only had time to inhale his inimitable aroma while planting a kiss on his cheek before this heart-warming scene was interrupted by a shout from on high. Leaning over the third floor banister, a slight, dark-faced person – Aziz’s appalling parent, I was soon to discover – wiped the goofy grins off those boys’ faces by galvanising them into violent action.

  Standing by, helpless, while my beloved was booted up his backside and casually clobbered across his broad shoulders with the barrels of guns wielded by five men half his size is by far the worst thing I’ve ever experienced, worse even than my near beheading for rapid release on YouTube. I felt each blow as if it had been on my own skin. ‘You cowards!’ I screamed as he toppled sideways, like a felled redwood, groaning. The guards who’d clapped the hardest at my banister-ride struck him the hardest before re-handcuffing me and frogmarching me to the lift.

  My blood was boiling. I was in lioness mode, vowing to myself that Aziz’s father would live to rue the day he’d been born – no, the day he’d been conceived.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  ‘Mrs Flushmin, we meet at last! I am General al-Majid.’

  Now, where had I heard that name before? Obviously somewhere in Yemen, sometime in the past few days, but for the life of me I could not recall where…

  At my entrance, the same slight, dark man who’d given the order to beat the living daylights out of the man I loved, Aziz’s father, had risen from of a cloud of cigarette smoke behind a dark wood laminate desk. With my hackles up already I kicked off boldly with, ‘You’ll be inviting the Americans who installed your CCTV cameras to a viewing of the savagery I’ve just witnessed, will you?’

  ‘Ah!’ he said, with a poisonous smile. ‘Very interesting! You have heard of “waterboarding”, have you Mrs Flushmin?’ He lit a cigarette before continuing: ‘Our American allies have found it most effective, but here in Yemen we try not to waste water if we can help it. Each to their own method of extraction…’

  I swallowed hard, inwardly cursing the Americans for having robbed their allies of any right to the moral high ground, and tried a different tack: ‘My surname is Flashman, not Flushmin. If you’d just remove these silly handcuffs, I’ll write it down for you…’ I said, striding straight across a stretch of shiny parquet floor towards him to thrust my tightly praying hands in his face. Once free, I intended to help myself to a biro from his plastic pen-tray and a Post-it note from his matching plastic dispenser – both American, from Staples, if I wasn’t much mistaken - and scribble my name in large capitals for him, before requesting a cigarette.

  ‘Your attitude, Mrs Flushmin, is forcing me to conclude that you have not yet comprehended the gravity of your situation,’ he said, narrowing snakily hooded eyes at me as he stubbed out his half-smoked Rothmans, ‘I must warn you that things will not go well for you if you continue in this way…’ I wondered if he’d watched too many Bond movies; seeing him waste a good two inches of a Rothmans was torture. ‘I am not going to remove your handcuffs,’ he went on, ‘because I do not require you to write down your name. I have it written clearly here, at the top of no fewer than ten reports detailing your anti-Yemen activities during the past week.’ So saying, he sat back down in his swivel chair, ominously spreading a sheaf of coloured papers out to form a pretty fan for himself and flicked it slowly to and fro, as if to say ‘Are you feeling the heat yet?’

  We stared at each other appraisingly for a while, until his reptilian gaze, resting an instant longer than was necessary on my breasts, dictated a change of tactics. Hitching one buttock and half a thigh onto his desk, I leant across the desk to target him with no more than five centimetres of cleavage, confident there was more in reserve if that didn’t do the trick.

  ‘General al-Majid – or may I call you Abu Aziz?’ I began, deploying the overflowing ashtray voice I tend to resort to when intent on seduction.

  ‘No, you may not call me Abu Aziz. Aziz is my third, not my first, son,’ he intercepted me with a sneer.

  ‘General al-Majid,’ I re-launched, ‘I am aware that I have put the odd foot wrong these past few days and I sincerely regret that, but frankly I’m sorrier still that I’ve wasted a whole week down south when I could have been here, consorting with men of your calibre, with the people who really matter in Yemen, seeing and learning things that will help me put your great country’s strong case more fully and forcefully in our corridors of power back in London…’

  It had seemed to me that his face was starting to register a soupcon of interest so I had begun to breathe more easily, but ‘Finished?’ he interrupted briskly, ‘How unlike an Anglo-Saxon to waste time with idle flattery and false talk! I am grateful to our American advisers and trainers here for recently impressing upon me the importance of correctly valuing one’s time – “time management” is the term they use…’ Only then did I realise that his face had been registering interest in the clock behind me rather than in my cleavage or my kind words about north Yemen. ‘Seven minutes later than I’d planned,’ he declared, ‘we will proceed now with an examination of these reports.’

  ‘I don’t suppose there’s any chance of a coffee or a cigarette – preferably both?’ I hazarded miserably.

  ‘No. Mrs Flushmin, you have a remarkable ability to forget your predicament and that it is impossible for you to smoke or drink anything – coffee, tea or even vodka – with your handcuffs on. Now, please be seated on a chair, rather than my desk.’

  ‘Look here,’ I said, doing as I was told but desperate to go on the offensive again. ‘Naturally, neither of us wants to waste time, so let’s get straight to the point, shall we? How much of all this hullabaloo is about issues you have with your son’s sexuality?’ I’d switched to what I can best describe as my Woman’s Hour mode, probingly interrogating. ‘There’s something serious here which you both need to address and work out before you can move forward,’ I said, hurling in as much as I could remember of the revolting language Fiona had used while training to be a counsellor. ‘You may find this hard to believe, General, but your son adores you and I’m sure you love him to bits too, but you need to learn to accept him for who and what he is, and then give yourself permission to show you care. Only then will you be able to move on… Admit it,’ I went on without pausing for breath or a glance in his direction to gauge his reaction, ‘none of this is about me, is it? Umm? Deep down, you know you’re both hurting. You don’t need to tell me; I know how families can be! I’d be happy to try and mediate a reconciliation, if you like. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying he’s not irritating but…’

  ‘Mrs Flushmin, my relations with my third son are not your business, or even mine at this moment.’ Damnation! An
other dead end. ‘Now, your first infraction -’

  ‘How much are these Americans paying you, General?’ I rallied again for a fresh attack, ‘or do all those millions of dollars trickle straight down from the president in the shape of LandCruisers and all expenses paid luxury trips to German clinics to have your faulty waterworks fixed?’

  ‘Mrs Flushmin!’

  ‘Sorry, I take that last bit back,’ I retreated once more, but only pour mieux sauter. Hadn’t Aziz warned me that he’d be aiming to ransom me for the price of the car? Now for the nuclear option: ‘I just think you ought to know that back in England I own a stately home not very far from London which I’d be very pleased to make available to you for the period of one year – if you can just see your way to releasing myself and Sheik Ahmad al-Abrali…‘

  ‘You are wasting your time, Mrs Flushmin,’ he said, lighting another Rothmans, and relaxing back in his chair.

  A year not enough. I thought quickly, ignoring a pop-up cartoon of a furious Fiona. ‘Five year lease? It’s Queen Anne with a Victorian chapel, its own hundred acres of parkland, half a mile of drive, a roof that’s in good repair, a reasonable income from hiring out the ground floor as a wedding venue approximately ten times a year, trout-fishing…’

  ‘You are degrading yourself, Mrs Flushmin…’ sighed the general from behind his smokescreen.

  Hellfire and damnation! Aziz had been wildly mistaken. Whatever he may have been like before moving to Sanaa and collaborating with the Americans, his father was now plainly incorruptible: ‘Mrs Flushmin, there are only two things you need to know about me. First, I am extremely rich and second, my threats are never empty. If you do not want both your ears and both your lips sliced off by that jambiyah up there in that wall cabinet, you will be SILENT! NOW!’ he bellowed at me. I waited while he scribbled on a pad of pistachio green paper, ripped off the top sheet and added it to his pretty fan. ‘There!’ he announced with satisfaction, ‘I now have eleven reports concerning your movements and activities since your arrival in our country almost a week ago. Your failed attempt to corrupt a state official has been added.’