2007 - Salmon Fishing in the Yemen (32 page)

And the rain was heavy. The summer rains in the Yemen are really just the tip of a vast system of monsoon rains which miss the rest of Arabia but brush the southern coast of Oman and the Yemen for a few weeks. In those few weeks the rain can fall with the force of a tropical storm, causing flash floods of just the sort we experienced that day in the Wadi Aleyn. I suppose I should have known, but I’m a fisheries scientist not a hydrologist, nor a meteorologist. Nevertheless, I still blame myself for not foreseeing it. Not one of our computer models predicted what happened.

I remember shouting at the top of my voice to the sheikh and the prime minister to get out, but the growing noise of the river and the hiss as the rain struck the surface of the water drowned out the sound of my voice. Colin saw the change in the river, saw the colour go from clear to brown and heard the menacing change in its song. He knew exactly what was happening but he still waded out into the river to try and save his master. It was calculated heroism. Someone should give him a medal. But too much happened that day, and Colin’s gallantry has been forgotten by most. But not by me.

I turned and shouted at Peter Maxwell to do something, but Peter’s face was white and strained with fear, and I don’t think he heard me. He started scrambling up the bank to get away from the river. The security men all knew that something was wrong, but they hadn’t worked out where the danger was. They thought it would come from the ridges above; they thought in terms of a human enemy, not a natural one. They were looking the wrong way.

Then there was a flash, and a shot was fired from somewhere. That distracted the security people even further. I heard afterwards that one of the sheikh’s bodyguards had been shot, but I never found out why. I didn’t see it. I was looking upriver and screaming at the prime minister to get out of the water.

Then I saw the wave come round the corner, about 300 metres away, and I thought we would all die. It was a surge about ten feet high, brown and white, coming towards us at the speed of an express train and making much the same sort of noise. In that moment I remember thinking, I hope the salmon don’t all get swept downstream, and then my own instincts took over and the next thing I remember was hanging on to a boulder at the top of the bank while the water tugged at my feet.

When the waters receded and most of the security people and the sheikh’s bodyguard had headed off downstream to see if they could find the bodies, I stood by the mouth of the channel feeding salmon into the wadi. I watched fish after fish enter the flow, turn as it smelt the water, and head upstream. I stood there without moving for a long time, and my heart was too full to speak. At first a few journalists and TV people came down and tried to get me to comment on what had just happened, but they weren’t interested in my salmon. They only wanted to talk about the accident and the prime minister. They weren’t interested either in what had happened to Colin or to the sheikh. I had nothing to say to them. After a while they went away, and an hour or two later I heard one of the Chinooks lift off, taking them all back to Sana’a to file their stories.

When the last salmon had left Holding Basin N°1, I sat on a flat rock by the water’s edge. The rain had stopped, and between ragged clouds the sun sank lower in the sky. From time to time I glanced over at the construction site, to see what was going on. I saw Peter Maxwell, a hundred yards or so away, talking endlessly into a mobile phone. I wondered what was so important until I remembered about the prime minister. I sat on the stone, and I thought about the project and the part I had played in it. No matter what happened to me now, they could not take this away from me. This was the greatest achievement of my life. It was not mine alone, but I knew that without me it could not have happened. I found myself wishing that Harriet could have been there, missing her dreadfully, because it was her achievement too, and this would have been her day too. But of course then she would have seen the sheikh being swept away. She had been right when she spoke of her foreboding. And I wished the sheikh could have been there so that I could have shared this achievement with him.

There was a shout from far upstream, and I saw one of the Yemenis who had gone further upstream to fish come running at top speed down the track. It was Ibrahim, our driver, one of the sheikh’s men. He saw me and screamed, ‘Dr Alfred! Dr Alfred!’

He ran towards me and I saw that he was carrying a dead salmon in his arms, nursing it like a baby. He must have abandoned his rod when he landed the fish. When he came near I saw that he didn’t yet know what had happened. He might even have been fishing above the plug. At any rate, he had caught a salmon. It was bright silver and weighed, I would guess, about ten pounds. A good fish, an excellent fish. Ibrahim’s face wore a huge smile, and he cried, ‘Dr Alfred! I have one fish!’

We embraced and slapped each other on the back, and the tears of happiness ran down our cheeks. The fish had fallen into the dust and Ibrahim bent to pick it up, still laughing at his luck. It was the first and, for all I know, the last salmon ever to be caught on the fly in the Yemen. At any rate, I have never heard of any other being caught or even seen swimming in the wadi since that marvellous, terrible day.

Then I had to tell Ibrahim about the sheikh.

Later on, as dusk was falling and the rock walls around us turning violet, the search parties trudged back up the canyon. In the endless wilderness of rock and stone, of vertical cliffs and holes through the riverbed into chasms below that formed the lower sections of the wadi, they never found the bodies. I think they were probably swept down a sinkhole into the aquifer itself, and there, in a sunless sea, rest the bodies of Jay Vent, politician, Colin McPherson, matchless gillie, and the Sheikh Muhammad ibn Zaidi bani Tihama, the almost holy man who created the Yemen salmon project.

Peter Maxwell came over to me. His face was still white, his eyes red, and his mouth set in a bitter, miserable twist. He said, ‘I hope you’re happy now.’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘in many ways it has been an enormous success, though I wish with all my heart we could have avoided loss of life. But, if we are objective about this, Peter, we have achieved everything we set out to achieve from a scientific point of view. The big question is what will happen to the project now the sheikh is dead. You must help me find out who is in charge here now.’

Peter Maxwell stared at me for along time without speaking. Behind him I saw the security team climbing into the second Chinook.

‘I’ll tell you what will happen,’ he said. ‘Your project is finished. You are finished. And I’m finished. You should have known this would happen. You should have known…’

He began to sob, and I touched his arm to comfort him, but he shrugged me off violently. ‘You’ve killed the best man in the world, one of the greatest men who ever lived, and you’ve ruined my life at the same time. And all you can think of are your bloody fish.’

He turned away and stumbled towards the helicopter. A moment later, it took off, and I never saw Peter Maxwell again.

Interrogator:

Did Peter Maxwell or any other representative of the prime minister’s office contact you after your return to the UK? Has there been any attempt to influence your evidence to us in any way?

Alfred Jones:

When I got back to the UK I had become a non-person. When I turned up at Fitzharris & Price to discuss the ongoing management of the project I found that my job there was over. The sheikh’s heirs, whoever they were, did not share his enthusiasm for the project. The funding had been terminated before I even reached the UK. One of the partners in Fitzharris & Price met me in reception when I arrived in St James’s Street to pick up the threads and start work again. He handed me a letter from the firm of accountants who had been managing the finances of the project. The letter thanked me for my efforts in not many more words than those and enclosed a cheque for the next three months’ salary.

I read the letter then looked at Harriet’s colleague.

‘Is that it?’ I asked him. He shrugged his shoulders and said, ‘The rest of us never knew much about it. Grateful while it lasted of course, but we knew it couldn’t go on for ever. It was always Harriet’s baby, and she seems to have resigned her partnership.’

I never went back to St James’s Street and, as far as I am aware, neither did Harriet.

I spoke to her once or twice by telephone. She was staying with friends in south-west France and vague about her plans.

‘I’m so glad the project succeeded, if only for a day. You must never let anyone take that away from you, Fred. You must treasure that. But I’m sorry we had to pay so very high a price. I miss the sheikh terribly. It’s another death in the family, in a way.’

‘When are you coming back to the UK?’ I asked.

‘I haven’t any particular plans. I’m not spending much money out here, and my friends seem happy for me to stay as long as I want. I’ve got my own flat in one corner of their house and my own front door, and I can come and go without disturbing them. You know, the sun shines most of the time in this part of the world, and no one bothers me. It’s what I need. I know I’ll run short of money sooner or later, and then I’ll have to think about getting a job. But for now I just want to be quiet.’

‘Will I see you when you come back?’ I asked. I hadn’t meant to ask any such thing. I had no right to.

‘I don’t know, Fred. I don’t know. We’ll have to see what happens.’

I heard some weeks later that she’d managed to get a job in France, finding properties for English people looking for second homes.

Interrogator:

Please confirm what contact you have had with Peter Maxwell or his office since your return to England.

Alfred Jones:

Oh, I forgot you asked me that. Yes, I did pick up a voicemail from Peter Maxwell saying ‘I’ll make sure you never work again in this country’ or something along those lines, but then I heard him burst into tears just before he hung up so I didn’t take it very seriously. But maybe he did try and stop me being re-employed for some curious reason of his own. I do know that when I applied for my old job at the NCFE I received a very short letter from David Sugden complaining about cutbacks in their budget and regretting that my old position was not going to be filled as a result. I don’t know that I could have gone back there anyway. Then I rang some old friends in the Environment Agency and in the end I did find another job. It’s not a desk job. It’s outdoor work, and the pay is what you might call minimal compared with my old salary. So Mary was right. The good times didn’t last very long, after all.

I’m working in a new hatchery which has been built on the headwaters of the Coquet in Northumberland. Our job is to rear salmon fry from the egg in rows of stainless steel tanks in a small hut up on the moors. The idea is to ensure there will always be juvenile salmon available to be introduced into the river, even in years when natural production fails because of drought or some other disaster. I like the work. It’s very interesting and often hard labour, but I have plenty of time to think. Thinking is what I do most these days.

I never talk to anyone about the Yemen salmon project, although I am teased now and again about it by the people I work with.

The project acquired a degree of notoriety in the press after the deaths of the prime minister and the sheikh. It was written off as some kind of bizarre political adventure. There has been little appreciation in the scientific community at home of what we achieved. In the Yemen they remain very proud of it. The sheikh is remembered in prayer every day at the Ministry of Fish Wealth, which has taken over responsibility for the project. The holding basins have been drained, and all the machinery has been mothballed. In that dry climate it will take no harm for a few years. They say that one day salmon will be held in those tanks again and released into the Wadi Aleyn, but it hasn’t happened yet.

The people of al-Shisr netted all the remaining salmon in Holding Basin N°2 for several weeks after the sheikh’s death. There were nightly barbecues on the wadi bed, and the smell of grilled salmon rose every evening into the sky.

The deputy minister for fish wealth has written to me that the next five-year strategic fishery plan is currently being formulated, and when they come to discussing the role of a salmon fishery in the future development of the Yemen’s natural resources, I will be consulted. That was some while ago, and they have not been in touch since. I don’t know whether to hope that I will hear from them or not.

Looking back to that day the sheikh died, I know now that I was in shock, and his death had not really hit me. There was just too much happening. I couldn’t take it all in at the time. Since then I have grieved for him, and now, as I wade through the headwaters of the Coquet, emptying buckets of salmon fry into the river, I have conversations with him which are more than imaginary.

I hear him say to me, from somewhere behind my left shoulder, ‘Yes, Dr Alfred, we did it in the end. We believed in it, and so we did it.’

‘You were right, Sheikh. We believed. You taught me to believe.’

I hear the smile in his voice, although I cannot see it. ‘I taught you to take the first step: to learn to believe in belief. And one day you will take the second step and find what it is you believe in.’

I empty the bucket of juvenile fish into the shallow, gravelly stream, and say, ‘How will I know?’

And, fainter than the murmur of the rills of water trickling over the stones, comes the reply: ‘You will know.’

So, I work at the hatchery, and at night I sit in my rented two-roomed cottage near Uswayford under the green and brown bulk of the Cheviot Hills. I sit and I think. I don’t really know what it is I think about although I still think sometimes about Harriet. I try not to do that too often. That awakens memories I would rather not have.

Sometimes I think about Mary. I speak to her on the phone most weeks. I have given up email unless it is absolutely necessary. It is part of another life now. I speak to Mary on the phone but I reverse the charges because I really can’t afford the phone bills. She is working in Diisseldorf now. I’m not sure if it was the promotion she was expecting. I think it has been more of a sideways move. We all have our disappointments in life.