The Dhow House

by Jean McNeil

  ‘Well, maybe just one.’

  We arranged to meet in the bar in half an hour. The bar was lined with burgundy banquettes and gold-hemmed champagne glasses. We were not the first drinkers of the day. Men – the customers were all men, I noticed – were dotted on the banquettes, alone or in twos or threes. I did not recognise him straight away. Urs had changed into a dark linen shirt open at the neck to reveal a tanned chest. His fingers were like the rest of his body – lean and fine.

  I sat down. ‘It’s a bit early in the day to drink, don’t you think?’ I looked at my watch. It was four in the afternoon.

  ‘I’ve lost sense of what time it is. Or even what day. Anyway,’ he reached for the cocktail menu, ‘like I said earlier, it might be the last alcohol I see for a while, courtesy of the relentless spread of Islam. A daiquiri for under ten quid? Bonus.’ He raised his eyebrows. ‘Let’s get blotto. It’s on me.’

  ‘Ok, thanks, but I think it’s better if we split it.’

  ‘Sure.’ He did not say, as some men might have, suit yourself. He fixed me with a diagnostic look. ‘So, what’s your story?’

  ‘Which story would you like?’

  ‘The one where a jobbing doctor is pressured to provide information to the security services.’

  ‘Oh. That one. You first.’

  Urs had been contacted for the first time in Nigeria. ‘One of the local consular officers came to the hospital. He said there was a problem with my visa renewal, but that he was looking into it. He told me I had to come into the consulate to sort it out. Needless to say that was a ruse.’ There was a local separatist movement, Urs discovered. ‘I knew nothing about it. Nothing!’

  This was the topic of interest to the security services: would this Islamist separatist movement mount attacks in a thriving, cosmopolitan part of a country that was an important ally of the UK? But why should he come into contact with information, Urs asked the officer. He was only a doctor. ‘He said, “Doctors hear many things. They have their ears to the ground.” That’s the phrase he used – ears to the ground. I said, I’ve got my ears to people’s lungs listening for TB. How about you?’

  Around us the restaurant was filling up. Men in suits sat at the bar drinking imported whisky, platinum watches glinting against their skin. Pale, tall men with blond hair – Scandinavians, unmistakeable from their sheer altitude and sail-like cheekbones – leaned against the bar. I was more alert to all this random phenomena than I would have been, now that I had been pressed into service as eyes and ears. Anthony had told me I must treat everything I saw from now on as if it were a pattern, a code. I had to crack it, in order to see the shape of the true reality underneath the surface.

  The address led to a slim Georgian house on one of those furtive St James streets home to think tanks and government ministries – Chatham House, the Overseas Club, DEFRA. It was November. The streets were dark chrome and slick with rain.

  The invitation reached me in a barren period. I did nights mostly, and slept in the day. Nine days on, five days off. By night I pumped the stomachs of fifteen-year-olds, treated graze wounds from stab attempts in some local high street – the results of what ought to have been a mild altercation: queue-jumping in the supermarket, someone taking another guy’s parking space.

  The interior of the building had been painted in chocolate and raspberry. A grand staircase, carpeted in a deep, pulsating green, spiralled off to the left and the right. Why had I come? I asked myself as I mounted the stairs. Was I that desperate for a social life? I might not even recognise, let alone know, anyone.

  If I did see someone from my college I would be pressed to regale them with a litany of field hospital stories: grenade, mortar, evacuation, insurgency, IEDs, the duet of danger and boredom, danger and boredom, ticking over like a metronome. A woman among men and bombs. No one would know about the 10mg of propranolol I hid under my breakfast plate every day, the 2.5mg dose of valium I ingested at night, the nocturnal sweats, the hours spent shopping for clothes to wear on dates I lacked the courage to arrange, in part because I had never been on a date in my life. The few men I’d had a relationship with I’d met in the line of duty, in field hospitals or on training courses. We would sit next to each other on a hard bench one day in the camp mess to eat lunch, never having seen each other before, and that would be it.

  That was how I’d met Alexander. It had been unsought. One day we were sawing through overcooked chicken breasts, the next day we sat together in white plastic chairs watching The Day After Tomorrow – all the films shown on base were about natural disasters or apocalyptic scenarios – on a suspended television with sixty other people. The following day we were deployed together. I’d undergone this evolution only twice in my life, beginning with being strangers, then acquaintances, then graduating to wary colleagues before slowly becoming intimates. The days in between marred by life and death. It seemed to me a good way to get to know someone.

  The email had said Dress: Casual. When I arrived I found women in black banker dresses and heels and men in full suits. The people in the room looked as if they’d aged thirty years in fifteen. I headed straight for a mirror to measure myself against these people, their serious, straining expressions.

  On that night I was so grateful that someone approached me and engaged me in conversation I was prepared to overlook the fact I didn’t remember him at all.

  He didn’t look patrician or self-satisfied. He didn’t quite have his gestures or facial expressions under control – there was a floppy, anarchic quality to the way he waved his hands, grimacing and laughing at once.

  ‘You were in the year above me,’ he said. ‘You probably don’t remember me. I’m Stuart.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I’m not sure I remember anyone here.’

  ‘I barely made it through Politics,’ he confessed. ‘I’m a slow writer, as it turns out. Not good for journalism, or politics. Another reason I chose the civil service.’

  At the end of the conversation, as we were all being called to order for speeches on behalf of the organisers who were about to harangue us to continue being perpetually successful, we exchanged cards.

  A month later I received an email from Stuart. He wanted to meet, he said, to catch up. I met him in a tapas bar in Borough. For the first hour we talked about university. He listed the floor my room in first and second year was on, he reeled off the names of dinners and receptions we had both been at. It seemed plausible enough, but the fact remained I didn’t remember Stuart at all.

  I had meant what I had told Stuart the night we met, that I remembered little of my three years at university, which in retrospect appeared as one unbroken networking session punctuated by terrifying exams. I never shook off a feeling of fraudulence at having been accepted, the years spent doing cram courses and paying for private tutorials to get the necessary results from my comprehensive school education. I never lost the feeling I was there on charity, among the willowy issue of peers, ambassadors to somewhere or other and equine surgeons.

  I twirled my margarita. It was good, fresh lime juice, imported tequila. My head spun with the combination of altitude and alcohol.

  ‘At the end of the evening Stuart told me what he really did for a living and what he wanted from me.’

  ‘Aha,’ Urs said.

  ‘Aha, indeed.’

  Six months later I got the job that would lead to my posting to Gariseb, I told Urs. It was a routine briefing, they said. Just come in for half a day, the coordinator said on the phone. I was at work at the time, at St Thomas’.

  ‘I can’t get a half-day between here and my departure date,’ I said.

  ‘Well, it’s kind of obligatory.’

  ‘You didn’t tell me about this when I signed the contract.’

  ‘We didn’t know.’

  ‘Alright fine, I’ll have to trade a shift. Give me a day to sort it.’

  ‘It has to be Wednesday.’

  At this I lost patience. ‘Look, you call me in for a half-day I’m
not paid for, then give me two days’ notice.’

  ‘I can’t reschedule it. I’m sorry.’

  I went over what the organisation called the recruitment process. There was nothing unusual in it – I had seen the advert on the online portal, field surgeon, I knew the organisation by reputation; my friend Maria, who graduated in the same class, had worked for them for two years in Kurdistan. I emailed her and she gave a glowing report: expert logistics, they know what they’re doing, they keep their people safe, although there’s a Christian bent, she’d said. But you don’t have to encounter that much. The Christians keep to themselves. I’d wondered: Christian logistics in a part of the world where proselytising was punishable by death?

  I arrived at the organisation’s headquarters just south of Brixton Tube. In a month’s time I would be on a plane to the equatorial winter. I thought about the privations I would endure. Washing my hair once a week to conserve water. The desert sun which would etch deeper the fine lines only now beginning to appear on my face. I considered these trivial vanities, hardly worth regret. But still they got to me.

  The man was seated at the table. He wore a suit which had a very slight sheen in its fabric. A single folder crouched next to an iPad.

  ‘Dr Laurelson,’ he said, rising to his full, crisp, impressive height. ‘I’m Anthony.’ He sat back down, motioned to the chair opposite him. ‘I understand you’ll be at Gariseb for a year.’ He smiled encouragingly.

  An hour later I went straight to the pub and ordered a gin and tonic and drank it in two gulps, his words leaping through my head.

  I believe we are entering a time of war. A war potentially without end. The war will be dispersed. It will be everywhere. It will be between two ways of thinking, of being. Two civilisations.

  I don’t see any evidence of that.

  Within a year a new organisation will emerge in the Middle East. It will spread, first to north Africa, then to East Africa. It already exists, in fact. It is biding its time to announce itself to the rest of the world. When it does, all our lives will change.

  I’m just a doctor.

  You will be in a position to help us, to help all of us.

  If it’s that important you can put someone else in, surely. Someone better at getting information.

  There’s no one. And there’s no time.

  I left the office and walked back to St Thomas’, even though I was not on shift that night. I needed to be somewhere with people I knew, a stable reality. I passed by the nurses’ station which flanked A&E, the senior A&E consultant was there. He was a bearded tango enthusiast with a sharp tongue. He ordered me into his office.

  ‘Rebecca, Christ, what did you do, kill the Pope? I’ve just had bloody MI6 on the phone. You’re to do what they want. Whatever it is, just do it. Those fuckers don’t fuck around.’

  You have family there, they live between the capital and the coast. Anthony sat back in his chair and folded his hands behind his head, as if he had just played a trump card.

  They’re not family. I don’t know them. I’ve only met my aunt once, I barely remember her. I haven’t heard from her in ten years, at least.

  You don’t intend to visit them? Even out of coincidence? You’re there, they’re there. You might need somewhere to go when you’re on leave.

  Why does that concern you?

  It doesn’t, Anthony had said. Let’s call it coincidence. And with that he closed my folder. It was a little curlicue of doubt, or threat, on his part.

  ‘Coincidence,’ I say to Urs.

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘It doesn’t exist.’

  ‘So what does, then?’

  A seizure of control on the part of a deity, an engineered arrival. That there is an infrastructure to fate; in fact fate is theatre. Now I have been backstage and have seen the faded glamour of the dressing rooms, the rigs of lights and cascades of ropes, the tearful divas in the corridors. I will never watch the play in the same way again.

  ‘You’re far more valuable to them than I am,’ Urs said. ‘There’s no radical Islam in the DRC. At least not yet.’

  ‘Is that supposed to make me feel better?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Urs said. He deflated slightly, as if the fight had gone out of him. ‘I’m not very interested in secrets.’

  ‘But it seems secrets are interested in us.’

  ‘It’s not about secrets, or so they say. The only secret is that we have to keep it to ourselves – what we’re doing. Otherwise it’s hard information. We’re just part of an army of eyes on the ground, that’s how they see it.’ He stopped. ‘What’s your view on all this –’ he cast a slightly anxious glance around the restaurant – ‘on what we’re doing.’

  ‘I feel… neutral. I can’t imagine any information I’d come across would be that important. They know who the combatants are, where they come from, who trains them. They have satellite, communications chatter, drone surveillance. For all I know they could pick out a single camel in the middle of the Sahel if they wanted to and blow it up. They know everything.’ I drew a breath. My heart was racing. It might have been the alcohol. We were on our second drink. ‘Mostly I feel dread.’

  ‘That’s exactly what I feel.’ Urs nodded vehemently. ‘Dread. Where will it all lead? I treat someone, I report his background, his wounds, his seeming affiliations. Where will that end?’

  ‘Do you mean in someone getting killed?’

  ‘It’s entirely possible.’

  ‘What about you? Is your appearance today really coincidence?’

  He grimaced. ‘Do you mean was I planted, to find out if you’ll be a reliable source?’

  ‘I’m sorry. This is making me paranoid.’ I looked around the room. One of the Scandinavians was eyeing us. I stared back until he shifted his gaze. ‘I don’t think I’ve really taken it on board, what it means, until now.’

  ‘Why did you agree to it?’

  ‘I didn’t. I never said yes, but I didn’t say no, either. I was flattered, maybe. Not a very good reason, is it?’

  ‘It’s an honest reason.’

  Honesty. The word crouched between us.

  ‘And here I am, the person who never said yes, but didn’t say no, either. Having a drink in a pink hotel in Africa.’

  Urs looked at his watch. ‘We have one night left in the land of the hotel minibar.’ He paused. His eyelashes fluttered, perhaps out of nervousness. ‘What do you say we share it?’

  ‘Thanks, but I’ve retired.’

  ‘From what?’

  ‘From… the whole arena of…’

  ‘Of sex.’

  ‘If that’s what you want to call it,’ I said.

  ‘What other name does it have?’

  ‘So many. None of them good.’ I tried a rueful laugh.

  ‘I’m trying not to take this personally.’ He sat back in his chair. ‘Could you be a bit more specific? You mean, it’s not about me – you find me attractive and so on. Or at least I hope you do.’ He gave a very English defensive laugh. ‘But you’re recovering from a break-up, or a divorce, or some episode of bad faith.’

  That phrase of his is still with me, now: episode of bad faith.

  ‘I’m not up to it,’ I said. ‘I just don’t have the conviction anymore.’ It hit me, a revelation. I would have liked to feel unrepentant, or say I did. But I felt a need to apologise to him. I wasn’t letting him down, I was letting down my entire species. ‘It’s too – brutal. Sometimes, when I’m kissing someone, I start to see their subcutaneous veins. I see the yellowed gums of the smoker. I see adipose tissue.’

  I saw a door open, or shut, in his eyes. ‘You know, you’re quite serious.’

  ‘Being a doctor is serious, don’t you think?’

  ‘From time to time I want to be frivolous and impulsive, that’s all.’ He looked genuinely sad. ‘You’re like my classmates. You’re one of those people who has just aced everything, as the Americans say.’

  ‘Being clever wasn’t a point of person
al pride for me, it was survival.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘To get through medical school I needed scholarships all the way. I didn’t have family money.’

  ‘Still, Cambridge, then the army.’

  ‘I didn’t ace either of those. I wasn’t really built for the army. I was just very good at putting on a front. The overachiever, the person who was not intimidated by death or aristocrats. That’s Cambridge and the army, respectively, in case you’re wondering.’

  He laughed. More people had come into the bar and dining area. Now we had to raise our voices to be heard. He swivelled his head around the room. ‘There’s a real middle class here,’ he said. ‘It’s good to see that happening in Africa.’

  ‘I don’t think they’re middle class.’

  ‘I was trying to be positive, I guess.’

  ‘I’ve only been here a day but I kind of like it, this city,’ I said. ‘It feels raw. Vital. But decadent, too. There’s something heady about it.’

  ‘You mean, apart from the altitude?’ Urs smiled. He looked over his shoulder at the row of businessmen around the bar, the brushed chrome sheen of their suits, their pale pink shirts knotted with ties. ‘You can just tell there’s so much new money here,’ he said. ‘I’ve never seen so many Rolexes and Porches in my life. When I was driving in from the airport it was like Knightsbridge, only with beggars at every traffic light.’

  ‘It’s the fastest growing economy in Africa, that’s what they told us at the briefings,’ I said. ‘Oil, defence contracts, telecommunications, finance, export agriculture, the rose and string bean farms, even fashion, you name it.’

  He nodded. ‘A heady brew indeed. Never mind that the biggest anti-terrorism operation besides the Middle East is being run out of here. It’s the sort of place that makes you feel like an idiot for taking anything at face value.’ We both darted suspicious glances at the businessmen then, imagining who they really were, behind the Armani suits and the Longchamp watches bought on business trips to Zurich.