A Foreign Affair (4 page)

‘
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 lady-like 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 grenade 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 men-folk 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.

Once again, I was forced to reconsider because back in front of the castle peace and quiet reigned, except for a pious mumbling. Each of the men had unfurled a little prayer mat in the dust and was facing Mecca for the noon prayer. If they were arms smugglers they were worryingly God-fearing arms smugglers, I decided. Up and down they bobbed, busy about their blessed business while the chickens pecked in the dust, and the disabled LandCruiser, their red pick-up and all those new weapons baked in the fierce midday sunshine. The children, the young woman and I retreated from the heat to the cool interior of the mud castle, straight into a room furnished with a 50-inch Sony television tuned to some noisy children’s cartoons, and some mattresses lining the walls. Once my eyes had grown accustomed to the gloom I became aware of a very old man crouched in one corner of the room, motionless and desiccated as a mummy.

Fatima gestured to me to make myself comfortable. Impossible. For the next half an hour, all the girl children manhandled me as they would have done a giant Barbie doll; my hair, my watch, my breasts, my mules, my mascara, my painted toenails, a mole on my neck, my blue eyes, even my bra-straps, were all fiddled with and marvelled over. I tend to give children a wide berth. Living in too close proximity to my Highgate friend’s six year-old had only deepened my dislike of their habitual commotion, but these ones instantly doted on me, however little encouragement I gave them. I began to feel like Julie Andrews; if the temperature hadn’t been so unsuited to any exertion whatever I might have jumped to my feet and led them in an all-dancing, all-singing Yemeni version of My Favourite Things – ‘
whiskers
on
Islamists
and
hot
sun
on
dry
rocks
,
overdressed
womenfolk
and
privvies
without
locks
...
brown
cardboard
boxes
all
filled
up
with
guns
...
’

Hot and bothered by all that poking and stroking, I was tempted to administer a round of little pinches to as many little brown arms or thighs as I could reach, but I resisted the urge and passed the time profitably by getting them to teach me some more Arabic. In the space of about an hour I’d mastered numbers one to ten, boy and girl, chair and table, heart and liver, car and aeroplane, gun and grenade, cat and dog, but had resolutely drawn the line at memorising all their names. Every time I looked there seemed to be more of them. Young Fatima couldn’t possibly have spawned all those children, not even if she’d kicked off production at the age of eleven, not even if half a dozen or so were twins or triplets. I suspected the presence of perhaps half a dozen adult females in some area of the establishment I might never gain admission to.

Fatima had disappeared, into the kitchen to join those other females in the preparation of a meal by the smell of it. I hadn’t eaten anything but a single serving of dry Rice Krispies since 6.30 that morning and was ravenous, heartily wishing I could pop outside to the LandCruiser to raid my suitcase for the bag of Bombay mix. At last, a long thin sheet of blue and white striped plastic was tidily laid on the packed mud floor by the eldest of the girls. Leaving me alone with my own body and clothes at last, the others skipped from the room, returning with dish after dish of food to put on that plastic landing strip. I was then led outside to have my hands washed; one girl poured some water over my hands and another carefully dried them with a pink paper tissue. Back inside the plastic strip was already covered with salads, mini bananas, bowls of honey, high stacks of round flat breads, mounds of yellow rice with unidentifiable meaty objects nestling in them, cucumber and chopped tomatoes, and steaming teacups of chicken broth with segments of fresh lime on their saucers.

The men began appearing, all delicately wiping their wet fingers on pink tissues just as I had, before settling themselves around the food and starting to eat, and gesturing to me to do the same. Neither the young woman nor any of the girls joined us at the meal. I was therefore the only female among ten or more males who ranged in age from the ancient patriarch, who surprised me by popping in some dentures and making a greedy beeline for the meat, to a toothless toddler who sucked on a banana he kept dipping in the honey. In that hungry company, I made sure that I tucked into as much of the spread as I could, as fast as I could. The broth flavoured with freshly squeezed lime juice was a particular culinary triumph. It struck me that the dish-watery chicken consommé Fiona so prided herself on serving up at all her dinner parties would be mightily improved by a similar flavouring. Knowing how hugely it would irritate her to tell her so, I made a mental note to pass on the tip the next time I was at Widderton.

But would there be a next time? What if, like some prisoner on Death Row, I’d just enjoyed my last meal in the land of the living? Surely I hadn’t been towed all the way out here to amuse the children? One or other of the men might be planning to press me into service as a supernumerary wife perhaps? I did know that Mohammad had allowed his followers four each. While I didn’t fancy the idea of having to share the contents of my suitcase with any other wife, I thought I mightn’t mind sharing a husband. One would have been hard put to find as fit a group of young British males as that troop of pious gun-runners in their
futas
and tastefully toning head-cloths outside the pages of one of our fashion magazines. It struck me then that, like the members of a 1990s boy band, they were so uncannily alike to look at they had to be brothers or dangerously inbred cousins.

Not until everyone had eaten, quickly and in silence, and got up from the floor to go and wash their hands with the aid of a little water and more delicate finger work with pink tissues, not until I was herded into an outbuilding, a carport-like structure for a post-prandial qat chew and invited to settle on one of the mattresses lining the walls, did I realise that one of that toothsome troop spoke English.

‘If you’re wondering what’s going on,’ he muttered in a Brummie brogue, ‘we’re going to stay here all afternoon, chewing and chilling and working out what the fuck we’re going to do with you.’