A Foreign Affair (20 page)

Chapter Twenty-six

My cell was airless and windowless, murkily lit by a fly-encrusted fluorescent strip tacked crookedly over the door. Aside from a length of foam rubber mattress, covered in a grimy nylon sheet and a smelly old pouch of a pillow, there was a covered plastic bucket in one corner, near some rusty pipes, no tap.

It stank grimly of damp, sweat and urine but it was at least cool and, with my handcuffs removed at last, I was tempted to start rootling around in my pink Puma bag which a guard had kindly chucked on the mattress for me. Total immersion in my Vogue’s ‘capsule wardrobes for holiday travel’ might distract me from my horrid surroundings, raging thirst and aching heart.

I was wrong. I couldn’t stop fretting about Sheikh Ahmad, hoping against hope that someone was tending his wounds for him, but also wondering if my declaration of love had had time to sink in. Restless, I got up and paced my cell – all six by three feet of it – and had just paused to relieve myself in the bucket by the cell-door when it opened to admit none other than Mrs Rev.

‘You must have the wrong room number,’ I snapped at her, with my knickers round my ankles.

‘Oh! I seem to have interrupted you mid-stream, but I’m sure you won’t mind. I know from personal experience at Mukalla airport, if you remember, how frank you like to be when it comes to bodily functions,’ she said, standing only two feet away and staring down at me unflinchingly while my bladder relinquished its last trickle. ‘Keith and I just happen to be in Sanaa for the christening of the consul’s twins tomorrow. Actually, it was Keith’s idea to visit you, but prison rules say no fraternising between the sexes in the cells, so here I am.’

‘You don’t expect me to make you welcome, do you?’

‘No. However, I do pride myself on knowing my Christian duty, dear,’ she sneered, lowering her vast bulk in its saffron yellow caftan onto one half of my thin mattress.

‘And what exactly do you think that is?’ I towered over her now, arms akimbo, ‘If you want to do something useful, I could do with a coffee and something to eat.’

‘Actually, I was thinking we might say a prayer together,’ she answered me in a tone that made my flesh crawl, and turned to scrabble around in a duty free plastic bag for a bible she’d brought.

Instead of yanking her to her feet and booting her straight back outside the door, my mind jumped a few steps ahead. That bag of hers looked suspiciously like the one into which she’d popped my precious family heirloom, Harry Flashman’s binoculars, at Mukalla airport. ‘Thanks, but no thanks you sanctimonious kleptomaniac,’ I told her, ‘The very last thing I feel like is bible-reading with you. Let’s talk business instead.’

‘Me? Kleptomaniac?’ she almost choked, ‘Pots and kettles! But what kind of business did you have in mind, dear?’

‘Listen! You give me the cold shoulder for no reason and splatter my favourite outfit with grease, so I help myself to some gin; I liberate a few little goodies from your guesthouse kitchen, most of which you probably didn’t even know you had, so you scupper my chance of a lift back to Sanaa from Silent Valley; I broadcast the state of your bowels at Mukalla airport, you denounce me as a thief. What’s the score? Love all, by my count, quits in other words. So why go and kick off another round by nicking my ancestor’s binoculars?’

‘It’s very simple, dear. You’re not only a thief but a shameless impostor. When you claimed to be the grand-daughter of Brigadier Winchelsea you carelessly overlooked the little possibility that one of those gathered there at Silent Valley was a true relative of his – namely, myself. I can find it in my Christian heart to forgive a little pilfering and a lot of rudeness but I’d rather die than let you get away with a falsehood about my family name. You stole my family honour so I stole your family heirloom. Do you understand me?’

‘Yes, of course, every Flashman knows the meaning of honouring a family name,’ I replied, surprised to have discerned a sliver of common ground between us.

‘Good!’ she said, her plump digits fingering that plastic bag. ‘I have brought your binoculars along today in the hope of being able to return them to you, but that will depend entirely on your meeting an important precondition.’

‘Oh? – if you’d like me to put a little corrective disclaimer notice about your forebear in the
Daily
Register
for example, I think I can arrange that.’ I said.

‘Oh no, dear! What real amends would that make? And anyway it’s to the Almighty, not me, that reparation is due.’ I didn’t like the turn that negotiation was suddenly taking, and I was right to worry. ‘Your heirloom will be returned to you,’ she continued, ‘but not before you have knelt here before me while I read the word of God to you, not before you have repented, opened your heart to God and begged to be born again in His grace.’

‘I’d rather lick your armpits!’ I shouted randomly, reaching down to grab the bible out of her hands and preparing to crown her with it. I was suddenly incandescent, quite beside myself, with anger, shouting: ‘Bible-bashing blackmailers like you are giving the Christian faith I love a bad name. You’re little better than the bin Ladens of this world or those Jewish fanatics who’ve colonised the West Bank! With you lot throwing your weight around the world the rest of us western Christians haven’t got a leg left to stand on! I could strangle the lot of you!’

‘Don’t you think you’ve got enough murder charges pending, dear? The ambassador certainly does,’ she was saying, glaring up at me, bold as you like.

That last sneer of a ‘dear’ – coming on top of my lack of sleep and sustenance, and watching my beloved being beaten up, and having Aziz’s father get the better of me with the terrible news of the deaths and injury caused by my speech in Seiyun, and being confined to that cess-pit of a prison cell, knowing I couldn’t rely on any diplomatic assistance – must have tipped me over the edge. I had had enough.

‘Get up, you rancid butter-ball! Get up this instant!’ I screamed at her, dancing around her, Bible cast aside, my fists at the ready. When she ignored my command and, still seated on that mattress, rolled herself up like a hedgehog around that precious plastic bag, I dropped to my knees in front of her and began hammering on her back in the manner of a vigorous Keith Moon, losing myself in the rhythm of my tumultuous tattoo, thrashing and pounding away, deaf to the roars which brought a couple of guards running, deaf to their barks of Arabic as they hauled me off her and re-handcuffed me and pushed me roughly into the bucket corner of the cell with my face to the wall. But I did hear Mrs Rev’s outraged yelps as they helped her to her feet and she hobbled past me out of the door, and I’ll never forget her devastatingly plucky parting shot: ‘Thanks for the massage, dear!’

Game, set and match to Mrs Rev.

Sliding to the floor by that toxic bucket, I prayed to St Serafim of Sarov for a miracle and wept and wept and wept. I was still sobbing my heart out when the door of my cell opened to admit the British ambassador in his familiar panama hat and creased linen suit. In his hand was a Tesco plastic bag which I prayed to St Serafim contained something edible. Once I’d allowed him to blow my nose for me with a used tissue he found in his pocket, I calmed down and waited while he fetched a guard to remove my handcuffs and provide me with water. The honey sandwich he’d brought me was manna from heaven.

‘Better?’ he asked gruffly, as I finished it.

‘Much, thank you.’

‘Let’s get to work then,’ he began with a grunt, lowering his bulk onto my mattress beside me, ‘I’m sure I don’t need to tell you Ms Flashman that you’re in very serious trouble, not just with the Yemeni authorities, but with us.’

‘Us?’ Was he entitled to use the royal ‘we’?

‘I mean, the Foreign Office, the Met...’

‘What for, for crying out loud?’

‘To the Yemenis’ eleven charges against your name we’ll be adding three more. First, your false impersonation of a representative of the security organs of the British state empowered by Britain to promote a movement diametrically opposed to the aims and interests of Britain and her allies...’

‘But...’

‘But nothing. I’ve just come from General al-Majid’s office where he invited me to listen to the recordings and see the transcriptions of statements and claims you made in Seiyun, so there are no “buts” about it.’ We’re looking at fraud.’

‘I see...’

‘I wonder if you really do,’ he interrupted, ‘because you appear to be ignorant of the fact that we’re currently doing everything in our power to preserve the status quo in this country in order to prevent al-Qaeda getting as firm a foothold here as it has had in Pakistan. Of course, we have nothing against the southern separatists personally – I’m in favour of Scottish independence myself - but the very last thing we need is a breakaway south Yemen overrun by bin Ladens!’

‘I see,’ My friendly heavy had warned me...

‘Washington’s kicking up a stink about you already. Thanks to your antics they’re not going to listen to a word we have to say about the counter-effectiveness of using their ruddy drones in this country; I spent all this morning being bawled at, first by my US counterpart and then by the Yemeni foreign minister, and I’ve got London breathing down my neck on a half hourly basis...’

‘So you’re not in the best of moods...’

‘No. Now, moving on. Your promotion of yourself by means of images of the late Princess Diana printed on Yemeni head-cloths, while on the face of it a lesser crime, is the one most guaranteed to disgust and outrage the man on the Clapham omnibus.’

‘Fat lot it has to do with him!’

‘For your information, you’ve caused a serious diplomatic incident. The story has been top of domestic news bulletins since 10 am this morning.’

‘I see’

‘Last but not least, there is your false claim to be the granddaughter of a fallen hero – a crime uncovered by said hero’s daughter, the wife of the Anglican vicar in Aden. That, on the face of it, minor misdemeanour will disgust and enrage the tens of thousands of
Daily
Register
readers who will read the daughter’s exclusive double page spread account of it tomorrow morning. There are bound to be questions in the House.’

Yet another ace serve from Mrs Rev! I was trying to KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON, asking myself over and over again WWFHD? But the more I wondered, the sicker I felt, especially as news of the punishment I’d just inflicted on Mrs Rev had obviously not yet reached our man in Sanaa.

‘It’s my professional duty to warn you of two matters, Ms Flashman,’ he was saying, ‘First, Yemen and the UK do not have an extradition agreement and second, your crimes are of a kind unlikely to elicit any public sympathy in Britain.’

‘In other words, Her Majesty’s Government will be quite content for me to rot here,’ I said, with as much dignity as I could muster.

‘Try and get some rest,’ he said after a long silence, struggling to his feet with some more grunts. ‘Is there anyone you’d like us to contact back home?’

The mere thought of Ralph and Widderton Hall brought tears to my eyes, but they dried again the instant I remembered Fiona. She’d be over the moon to learn of my permanent incarceration on the other side of the world, probably plan a dinner party to celebrate.

‘No, not just yet, thanks. I don’t want to worry anyone,’ was what I told the ambassador.

Chapter Twenty-seven

In extremis, it is the little things that count. That much I’d learned. By the time the hands of the clock had inched round to visiting time and the ambassador was due again I’d improved my sordid situation in a number of small but vital respects.

Just one of my best Princess Di smiles had earned me a brown paper bag of sunflower seeds from the youngest guard. Next, I’d casually rearranged the top half of my butter yellow
shalwar
kameez
to reveal the longest possible cleavage, a simple but instantly effective manoeuvre that earned me two packs of cigarettes from the sleazy cell superintendent. In exchange for the stump of an old lipstick I never wore any more – Rimmel’s
Candy
Coral
, I think it was - my bucket was being slopped out the instant I’d used it by an African female.

Better still, I’d had a fairly detailed briefing on the physical and mental condition of Sheikh Ahmad from an English-speaker who’d insisted on taking my temperature and inspecting my throat and ears and turned out to be a member of Sheikh Ahmad’s tribe as well as a keen supporter of PARP. My beloved’s fine torso was very badly bruised, I discovered, some of his ribs cracked, his stomach aching and one of his liquorice-drop eyes possibly permanently blinded, but he was bearing up as well as could be expected thanks to the fact that one of his cell guards happened to be a distant cousin of Bushara’s and another a great-uncle of Jammy’s.

But best of all, I’d found the sweetest of
billets
-
doux
from Sheikh Ahmad himself scribbled in the margins of the page of blurb in the pack of paracetamol the fake medic left me. Unfortunately it was utterly unreadable, not just badly spelt. This precious crumb of intercourse set me dreaming. Deliberately disregarding the obstacles on the path to a ‘lived happily ever after’ outcome for our relationship – his inscrutability and four wives, our current imprisonment and, of course, the wider geo-politics of the matter - I dared to start fantasizing a future for us. First came a soft-focus image of us cantering across a Marscape on a camel. Next, I pictured myself as a comely consort to the first ruler of a newly independent south Yemen; hadn’t the late King Hussein of Jordan married a statuesque British blond? Finally, footage of me seated on a brocade sofa flanked by a couple of toffee-coloured cherubs playing with a rope of pearls around my neck while laughing up at their fond father, flooded my mind; three pairs of liquorice black eyes and a single pair of blue ones – actually, might some of them be green in accordance with the genetic experiments that Austrian monk conducted on sweet peas? Well, whatever colour those eyes were, they’d all be shining with love. Oblivious to my surroundings, careless of my fate, I was in such a sweet, tender mood by the time Scotsman showed up with another Tesco bag filled with Tupperware at around 2pm that his puncturing opening gambit shocked me to tears.

‘I’ve got nothing but some food and bad news for you,’ was what he said. ‘I’ve come straight from a meeting with general al-Majid upstairs. Are you aware that with the single possible exception of the president himself he’s regarded as the most powerful – some would say dangerous - person in this country.’

Sheikh Ahmad had said something of the sort, ‘Not a man to have as one’s enemy.’

‘Certainly not, and my meeting with him did not go well.’

‘Oh?’

‘No. He appears to be of the very firm opinion that your unprovoked and abominably ill-timed physical attack on the vicar’s wife, Marigold, yesterday morning was aggressively homosexual in intention...’

‘What?’ I giggled in disbelief, as much at the fact that Mrs Rev’s first name should be Marigold as at the idea of my desiring her, but the ambassador wiped the smile off my face with: ‘It might interest you to know that the penalty for homosexual acts in Yemen is death.’

‘Thank you, actually I did know that.’ I recalled Aziz’s tragic letter to me, ‘But this is just too ridiculous! Tell that snaky al-Majid to get hold of Marigold. I’m sure she’ll be only too happy to set him straight on the matter. She can’t stand the sight of me!’

‘I gather that one of the guards called to the incident yesterday reported that Marigold thanked you for “the massage”. It seems that the general has often travelled to western capitals and sampled the wares of massage parlours...’

‘Rottten reptile!’ I blustered while the ambassador quietly administered a last lethal thrust by informing me that, in Yemen, the death penalty was usually carried out by laying a person on their back on the ground and firing a single bullet through their heart.

I sat there in numbed silence, my thoughts racing hither and yon in search of a viable exit while my visitor quietly set about arranging various opened Tupperware containers on the filthy floor. Ravenous after eating only sunflower seeds all morning, I was soon distracted from contemplating my imminent and violent demise by the fabulous spread he was laying out on my mattress. There was hummus, a cucumber and parsley salad, some tinned tuna, a pair of boiled eggs, four fresh flatbreads, half a sponge cake and a handful of Quality Street. If this was my last meal in the land of the living, I wasn’t complaining.

The food must have had the desired effect of concentrating my mind; I was half way through the second boiled egg and eyeing the tuna when I experienced a lightning bolt of inspiration: ‘This daft new sex charge is actually a blessing in disguise,’ I asserted, ‘Look, if the press are allowed to get a good bite at the story, the gay-in-distress angle is bound to swing public opinion behind me. The pink lobby – the likes of Peter Tatchell but maybe Mandelson and even Elton John – will be up in arms on my behalf the instant they learn I’m on death row on account of my sexual orientation. They’ll raise a hell of a hue and cry, I guarantee you! And Blair can’t afford to lose the mighty pink vote, can he? They’ll move heaven and earth to get me out of here!’

A long silence was followed by a cautiously grudging: ‘I believe you may have a point here. There would be a frightful row about human rights and Washington’s gay lobby would back us up, which would certainly add clout. But you’ll still have a serious problem: the lack of any extradition treaty between the UK and Yemen. If the Yemenis feel like it, there’s nothing whatsoever to stop them hanging onto you, even hanging you for that matter, and frankly I am firmly of the opinion that General al-Majid has plans to do just that. He’s taken a real dislike to you.’

‘Yes, I’m afraid I rather mishandled my meeting with him,’ I conceded glumly, scooping a last few crumbs of the sponge cake into my mouth, ‘but he’s a real baddy. I mean, he’s all tied up with the al-Qaeda lot himself, isn’t he?’

‘You’ve heard that, have you? Yes, but sadly it’s only a rumour, no one’s been able to prove it, though, believe me, there are plenty who’d like to...’ he said, sighing and helping himself to a purple Quality Street - my favourite.

‘But it’s obvious, even to me, and I’ll tell you how I know!’

‘I’m all ears, hen!’

After painting the scene in that breeze-block carport where the boy-band brothers had sat and chewed qat while discussing my fate, I lightly sketched in the details of their preparations for my execution by electric carving-knife, before explaining how the whole event had been called off at the last moment, all thanks to a call from General al-Majid.

‘He called them? Not the other way round. Are you sure of that?’

‘Of course I’m sure of that! And of the name, because those boys kept repeating it until they were blue in the face, scurrying around like frightened mice, terrified of putting a foot wrong with the big boss. That’s what it sounded like. And just yesterday I ran into the one with the Birmingham accent – he’s in here too – so he can corroborate what I’m saying!’

‘This is more like it! Good lassie!’ he said, popping a toffee in his mouth, ‘I’m going straight to the president with this! He’ll be chuffed to buggery. He’s been telling me and my American counterpart for ages, at least a year, that he suspects General al-Majid of being hand-in-glove with the Islamists and plotting a coup against him, and there we were thinking it was just a wee ruse to get us to stay with the devil we knew and go on backing him, but it looks like he’s right on the money...’

‘But why hasn’t he just sacked him or had him bumped off? No, I’m sorry but I can’t let you have the other purple one,’ I protested, snatching it off the dwindling pile of sweets before his freckly paw could reach it. ‘I mean they don’t stand on ceremony in this part of the world, do they? A little car accident is easily arranged...’

‘You are getting the hang of the way the place works, aren’t you?’ he answered me, obligingly going for a strawberry cream instead. ‘But you haven’t factored in a crucial piece of the jigsaw: it just so happens that al-Majid’s standing among the special forces – the ones with all the best weapons – is reportedly extremely high.’

‘You’re saying al-Majid’s more powerful than the president? So how’s my information going to remedy anything? And can we be quite sure he’s the biggest baddy when, without his phone intervention on that occasion, I would have been a goner. If he’s such an Islamist why on earth d’you think he put a stop to my beheading? Perhaps I should be thanking rather than shafting him!’

‘Oh, don’t let any of that throw you off course! He probably thought he had more to gain by proving that Britain had neo-colonialist ambitions in south Yemen, and decided he’d give you enough rope to hang yourself with, which you duly did, in spades. But never mind about that now. The important point is that the president will be able to go public with this anti-al-Majid story and turn public opinion against the bugger. The vast majority of Yemenis can’t stand these bearded Islamists with their bombs and mayhem, especially since they’ve given the Americans a reason to start using their drones here. They’re livid at those bin Laden types for ruining the country’s tourist trade, every kind of trade, because no one dares insure any ships to dock at Aden anymore and they’ve got the Saudis on their backs...’

The ambassador’s leisurely, discursive approach to the challenge of sparing me the misery of spending my seventh night in Yemen in jail was starting to grate, as much as the way he was still helping himself to my sweets, ‘Ok, Ok – so you’re sure this’ll do the trick?

‘No, I’m not at all sure but it’s the only card we’ve got so we’d better play it,’ he said, helping himself to a last mint-green triangle before heaving his cream-clad bulk off my mattress.