A Foreign Affair (11 page)

‘Does Mukalla have an airport, by any chance?’

‘Yes Rozzer, why are you interested in an airport?’ he chuckled.

‘Are you familiar with the term “plane spotter”?

‘No?’

‘Well, a plane spotter is someone whose hobby is visiting airports and watching and noting down the makes and numbers of aeroplanes’

‘Oh, yes! I have seen the film
Trainspotters
.’

‘Precisely. Well, you may find this surprising but I’ve always been a bit of a plane-spotter; as children, my brother and I liked to spend our weekends at Gatwick. If it’s not too much to ask, I’d really love to drop by Mukalla airport...’

‘No problem,’ he said accommodatingly, ‘We will pass it very soon now, on the edge of town as we approach. You will see aircraft taking off and landing from the road. You have your Flashman binoculars?’

‘Yes, of course, but actually’ I clapped a hand to my crotch, ‘I might need to use an airport lavatory so, if you wouldn’t mind just dropping me at the terminal building...’

Chapter Thirteen

My way was clear. I’d be jumping on the first plane from Mukalla to Sanaa, complete with my suitcase.

As anyone would, Sheikh Ahmad had swallowed my story about menstrual cramps requiring that I access ‘items of feminine hygiene’ from my treasure chest at the earliest available opportunity. All I had to do next was work up a suitable froth of enthusiasm for national carriers and Airbuses and the like. Could he spare me an hour at the airport to attend to my two special needs? Yes, no problem, he would wait for me in the car, he said, while I used the lavatory and spotted some planes. He had some work to do, a few calls to make.

By the time we were sliding to a halt outside a single-storey breeze block structure on the scrubby edge of Mukalla, I was starting to pride myself on my quick thinking in the face of extreme danger, as well as on my unselfish public-spiritedness.

Not much to ‘spot’ here, I panicked, failing to make out a single aircraft on the dusty runway, through the afternoon heat haze. I was forced to concede that half an hour would amply suffice for my needs and then found myself wishing that I would indeed be rejoining him in thirty minutes and proceeding as planned, through that late afternoon sunshine, up inland to Hadramaut. In spite of everything I now knew about him, the business of parting from him felt as acutely painful as having a limb sawn off, but it was when he unloaded my suitcase for me, and insisted on us synchronising our watches, when he arranged my scarf as a modest head-covering, a procedure involving tenderly smoothing my curls, that I almost collapsed in grief for our still-born romance. I longed for him to give me some incontrovertible proof that all was not as I now believed it was, but how could he when he’d no idea what I was believing?

Having to snap out of love so suddenly was like rushing out into a blizzard without a stitch on. I couldn’t help it; my eyes were swimming with tears as I stumbled up some cracked concrete steps to the swing door with its cracked and filthy glass, my case banging on along behind me. I didn’t dare look back. Now I was lonely. My indisputable lack of judgment in coming away with the sheikh had shocked me into a first real appreciation of the dangers involved in being in love; no accident that people are often described as being ‘madly in love’, I noted for future reference. I’d only been experiencing a brief ‘episode’ of love-madness, I told myself firmly, but was now – fortunately and in the nick of time - restored to sanity and clarity of thought.

The check-in area was thronging with prosperous-looking young men – local oil workers I think - in jeans, nylon T shirts and baseball caps rather than filthy futas and checked head-cloths, but their womenfolk were in the usual full black rig, which gave me an idea. Not for nothing had I fought to keep my suitcase with me at all times; there was method at least in that madness. Before even securing myself an airline ticket, I decided, I’d make straight for the Ladies and unpack the curtains I’d nicked from the Revs. No matter if there was no flight leaving for Sanaa until evening, no matter if Sheikh Ahmad came looking for me after half an hour, I would be invisible by then in my do-it-myself
balto
.

Manoeuvring my suitcase into the Ladies – a rank and gloomy place with flimsy cubicle walls, cheap saloon-style doors and nothing but small dark holes to aim one’s undercarriage at – was immensely testing. Once in there, my suitcase easily monopolised most of the wash-basin area and began exciting great interest among the other women crowding in after me, obviously curious to know what it contained. Wheeling it into one of the filthy cubicles to open it and then trying to robe myself was out of the question, The delicate work of disguise would have to take place in public, as it were, which actually was all for the best because those women so enjoyed the sight of me trying to swathe myself in a half-way convincing approximation of a
balto
that they shrieked with delighted laughter, shaking their heads and tut-tutting like mad. Fussing around me, they began tucking and folding and pulling and tweaking like so many Paris
couturieres
. Finally, the bossiest among them seized the initiative, gleefully ripping up the edge of one curtain to provide me with one of those little face aprons. Funny and wild as schoolgirls, those women reminded me a lot of the mud castle’s foxy Fatima whom I suddenly regretted not having had a chance to say goodbye to.

It was as I was standing there, passive as a tailor’s dummy while being rendered fully fit for my purpose by the addition of my face apron, that my eye was caught by a sight that made my blood run cold. Unless I was very much mistaken, it was the pointed peak of a Mexican sombrero that I was seeing rising above the saloon door of one of the cubicles. And there were two slabs of purplish swollen feet rammed into a pair of mauve Crocs with about a foot of space between them visible below the door. It could only be my old nemesis, Mrs Rev. A loud report, followed by the squirt of an unhealthily liquid motion, confirmed my suspicion. Any second now she would emerge to discover me draped in her guesthouse curtains. I dreaded to think what fresh punishment she would devise for me.

No time to waste. High time I lost myself in the crowd of other female nonentities waiting in line to check in. Quickly thanking my happy helpers with the bars of Green & Blacks chocolate and pretending not to notice their miming to the effect that they would have much preferred gifts of face-cream and make-up, I snapped my case shut again, donned my sun-glasses and hurried out, only to find myself somewhat hamstrung. My disguise absolutely forbade me to speak English but after only four days in Yemen, my Arabic was naturally not fluent enough to either ask about flight times or purchase a ticket. There was nothing for it; I would have to act the deaf mute and mime my way onto a flight to Sanaa. I imagined that a five dollar bill here and there might smooth my passage, and I was quite right. It seemed there was very little one couldn’t achieve at Mukalla airport with a fistful of small dollar bills in one’s hand. Some sort of official, a pleasant-looking lad in a grubby blue shirt and trousers, whisked me straight to the head of the ticket queue. There, a finger drawn across my mouth plus the word Sanaa on a scrap of paper and slipped under the ticket-seller’s window with a hundred dollar bill secured me a seat on a plane leaving in forty-five minutes. Another five dollars, and the same pleasant official metamorphosed into my porter. The only remaining hurdle was security which, by the look of the rowdy shambles around a beaten up X-ray machine, seemed unlikely to delay me long. Still lurking like a evil toad at the back of mind though, was Mrs Rev; was there anything she could do to scupper me at this stage?

A glance at my watch – or rather a squinting grimace because I was wearing sunglasses as well as my face apron - informed me that my allotted half hour was up, that any minute now Sheikh Ahmad would come looking for me. At times as tense as that, I tend to mine the rich resource of my Russian Orthodoxy. I kissed the icon of the saintly Serafim of Sarov given me by my spiritual father, a holy monk called Parfeny who happens to hail from the same tiny town in Siberia as Rasputin, Pokrovskoye. I’ve always liked my religion medieval-flavoured. Relics and icons and colourful processions, re-enactments and rituals are all very much my thing. The way I look at it, Mrs Rev, Fiona and lunatics like bin Laden are on a hiding to precisely nowhere. Who’s going to thank them for turning all our God-shaped holes into giant hell-holes? Not God. I’m wildly digressing, I know, but only because what happened next is exceedingly painful to have to recall, let alone describe.

But so far, so good. My case was inching through that clunky old X-ray machine. Any minute now, I reassured myself, I’d be through and past passport control, gone where Sheikh Ahmad couldn’t reach me and Mrs Rev couldn’t harm me, as long as I wasn’t seated beside her on the flight, of course. But it was when I reached the other side of the X-ray machine that my Great Escape began to hit the buffers. Neither Mrs Rev nor Sheikh Ahmad were to blame, at least not in the first instance. In more senses than one, technology must carry the can because, for all its antiquity the X-ray machine proved perfectly efficient at flagging up objects not readily identified, such as a dented tin of baked beans.

The first I knew of the trouble was a volley of angrily shouted Arabic from the official watching the screen, but I was soon being yelled at and led off to a nearby table with my case, where a grim, soldierly sort instructed me to open it. Swiftly deducing that I was neither Yemeni nor a mute but a western woman in a poor approximation of local costume, he asked me in the English he’d presumably learned under British rule: ‘Madam, be so good as to remove from your luggage a cylindrical metal object.’ His English request and my gratuitously facetious English answer, only forgivable in the context of such a harrowingly recent close encounter with Mrs Rev coming hot on the heels of the discovery that the only man I’d ever been in love with was a Islamist terrorist - ‘I can promise you it’s not a bomb, unless, of course, you scoff the whole tin at once as someone not a million miles from me now may have done to judge by the sounds she was emitting in the Ladies a moment ago!’- were overheard by the Revs, whom I’d just seen some way behind me in the queue for security.

In what sounded to me like fluent but blindingly English-accented Arabic, Mrs Rev wasted no time in charging to the front of the X-ray machine line and raising a second alarm. I later learned that the gist of her bellowed intervention was: ‘Stop that woman! She’s a thief and an impostor!’ The ensuing kerfuffle – my brisk frisking and swift handcuffing, the disembowelling of my suitcase, the sampling of mustard powder and herbal teas, and the minute inspection of a bag of dirty laundry all reminded me of the abuse I once suffered at the hands of a brace of burly security women at Tel Aviv aiport.

I know I keep digressing, but picture me for a moment. Hands tightly secured behind my back, my face apron sagging like a horse’s nosebag, my undies and sundries spread out for all to see on that table, like items at a car boot sale. Picture Mrs Rev too, please, arguably a still more horrifying sight in her sombrero and fuchsia caftan, yammering on in loud Arabic while picking out all her possessions and pointing angrily at me there, still draped in her guesthouse curtains.

Naturally the hullabaloo attracted the attention of every living soul in that airport, including Sheikh Ahmad, who happened to reach the security section when I was at my very lowest ebb, watching Mrs Rev fiddle with my precious binoculars. The appearance of another of my foes, but one towards whom I couldn’t help still feeling extraordinarily tender, may have been the cause of my sudden eruption into a frenzy of fiery denunciation.

‘You’ve got the wrong person!’ I screamed at the English speaking official who’d accused me of having a bomb, ‘Here’s the terrorist you should be handcuffing! That’s the criminal you’re looking for!’ I yelled, jabbing my chin in the sheikh’s direction, ‘He’s only got bin Laden staying with him – he’s only sheltering a global murderer - he fought with him in Afghanistan and grew up with him in Jeddah - that’s the man you want! Looks like butter wouldn’t melt, doesn’t he? – but that smile masks the blackest, wickedest heart! Get me the British embassy on the phone!’

‘Rozzer!’ the sheikh barked at me sternly.

‘You hell-hound! Don’t you dare start ordering me around now as if I was a camel!’ I yelled at him, while noticing Mrs Rev slip my priceless family heirloom into a duty free carrier bag and proceed towards passport control, waggling her fat fingers at me in a ghastly adieu. ‘Think of it as “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth”, dear ...’ was her lethal parting shot.

A five- or even ten-way exchange of excited Arabic ensued, while Sheikh Ahmad strove to get to the bottom of what had been happening. There was much passing around of the tin of beans, and some calm and dignified explanation from the sheikh, who must have seen dozens of such tins on his annual sojourns in Brighton. I noticed that his every word was attended to most respectfully by every member of the crowd and, gradually, the atmosphere quietened, until I saw that one or two officials were smiling and shaking their heads in disbelief, while another was chuckling, and from under the face aprons of a number of women who’d been watching the affray came unladylike snorts and guffaws and finally, Sheikh Ahmad burst out laughing so hard there were tears streaming down his caramel cheeks. Even the English speaking official was smirking as he removed my handcuffs, handed me back my tin of beans, and indicated that I could dispense with my disguise and repack my suitcase: ‘You westerners, these days you are seeing terrorists everywhere – just like your UFOs and aliens!’ was his only comment.

There was nothing for it but to smile sheepishly, do as I was told and submit humbly to whatever happened to me next. Of course, I’d like to have had Mrs Rev dragged off the plane by the scruff of her fat neck and her duty-free bag ransacked for my binoculars, but the time didn’t seem right for a revenge attack. Three-nil to her, I calculated miserably, turning to Sheikh Ahmad to say, ‘I’m so sorry, I seem to have got the wrong end of the stick...’

‘Yes, Rozzer, but congratulations!’ said Sheikh Ahmad, seizing my hands and sweetly rubbing them in an effort to restore the blood supply, ‘You’ve given us all here a wonderful laugh, and that is a beautiful blessing because there is very little to laugh about in this country at this time.’

‘Didn’t I warn you?’ he said, as he heaved my re-packed case off the table, extended the handle and began steering me towards the exit, ‘I asked you to have patience but you didn’t listen. Instead of waiting to hear the whole of my life story you came to some very wrong conclusions very quickly and ran away and exposed yourself to all this unnecessary trouble.’