Olives

Olives

Alexander
McNabb

Copyright ©
Alexander McNabb 2011

The moral
right of the author has been asserted.

All rights
reserved.

No part of
this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior
permission in writing of the author, nor be otherwise circulated in
any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is
published and without a similar condition including this condition
being imposed on the subsequent publisher.

All
characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance
to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Smashwords
Edition

If the Olive
Trees knew the hands that planted them, their oil would become
tears.

Mahmoud
Darwish

My father has
slipped from us all, his mind increasingly
leached away by dementia. My one enormous regret is
that, back when he’d have understood what I was on about, I
couldn’t have put this book in his hands and said, ‘Hey, Dad, I’ve
written a book.’.

This is for
him anyway.

ONE

To be honest,
this was not one of my finest moments. I waited for something to
happen, picking flakes of paint from the wall and cracking them
between my fingernails before
letting them fall. The only sound in the police cell was
the ambient roar of emptiness with the occasional dry snap of
paint.

Anne, my
landlady and my lover, had cried seeing me off at Heathrow. It
always made her nose go red. She cried the day I came home and told
her I was going to move to Jordan for a year. It was our first row
in two years together but as we finally went through the act of
leaving there was only terrible sadness. I promised to call her
every day. As I rounded the corner into the security hall she
called my name out. I turned and she mouthed ‘I love
you’.

I blew her a
kiss as the shuffling queue took me out of sight.

The flight
was overbooked and they upgraded me to business class. I made
liberal use of the free champagne, trying to convince myself of the
sense of what I was doing. For the first time I confronted the
thought I might lose Anne, twisting it in my mind like a knife as I
sipped the cool drink and watched the clouds below.

My
black mood lifted as we bounced
through the turbulence above the black desert approach to Queen
Alia International Airport, the champagne adding to my feeling of
recklessness. I was still light-headed when I met the lugubrious
hotel driver, a beaten-down man called Amjad who sported a great
soup-strainer moustache as he stood in the arrivals line,
listlessly displaying my name on a sheet of paper. We walked out to
the car park and settled down for the drive to the Intercontinental
Hotel. The Grand Hyatt was out of bounds since my last, first, trip
to Jordan. My publisher, Robin, had set fire to my room with a
cigar celebrating the Ministry of Natural Resources contract I was
now coming to Jordan to fulfil.

Amjad asked
if this was my first time in Jordan, a question I remembered from
my last trip, along with the familiar honorific
‘
seer
’ and the faint reek of cigarette smoke. He was
delighted when I replied no, I had been before. The stands of trees
flashed past, the brown land dotted with pale stone-clad houses and
patches of cultivation. Every few hundred metres, someone at the
roadside hawked steaming canisters of coffee or great bunches of
radishes, rows of gleaming beef tomatoes and stacks of huge, green
and yellow mottled watermelons.

He offered me
a cigarette. I didn’t object when he opened the window and lit up.
I was in a happy place thanks to the champagne and giddy newness.
For now, my tearful parting from Anne was forgotten.

About halfway
to the city along the King’s Highway, Amjad startled me, wailing
and hammering on the wheel. A cop stood in the road ahead, waving
us down. We pulled over and a second cop strode up to the car and
wrenched the driver’s door open. They forced Amjad out of the car,
shouting. I watched him colour and push away the second copper’s
hand on his shoulder, getting a mighty shove back that made him
lose his footing. I’d normally have stayed out of the way in the
car, but their bullying made my blood rise, the champagne lending
me the courage to act.

Now my hope
and nervous anticipation about starting a new life overseas was
mired in this drab little cell. I shivered and pulled the grubby
blanket tight around me against the damp. The sunset glowed
balefully through the window high above. My movement brought back
the dull headache from the cop’s massive return punch, my cheek
still raw from being ground into the gritty tarmac as they pinioned
my arms.

I had never
had freedom denied me before. I had never been held against my
will. They pushed me into the cell and slammed the door and I
railed and pummelled at it, hurling obscenities at the uncaring
silence. My hands reddened and bruised, I finally slumped down on
the mean little bed and waited for something to happen, playing the
scene by the highway over and over in my mind, trying not to think
of Anne and what she’d make of my idiocy.

One thing was
certain. I had blown things in a big way.

They’d taken
my watch, so I lost track of time. It seemed like hours before I
found the little crack in the paint and started to break off tiny
chunks and snap them. I’d cleared the paint flakes off a couple of
square feet of wall by the time they came for me. It was dark
outside.

I tensed at
the sound of heavy footsteps echoing down the corridor, the clatter
of keys on steel. The door was opening to my shame. I felt sick. A
surly policeman stood aside for a silver-haired man in a brown suit
and heavy beige overcoat. He cast an incurious eye around the cell,
brushing at his moustache with his fingers and wrinkling his
nose.

‘
Paul
Stokes?’

A smoker’s
rumble. I nodded.

‘
I am Ibrahim
Dajani. You must come with me now.’

I stood,
steadying myself against the wall. ‘What’s happening?’

He smiled.
‘You are being released. Come.’

I followed
him, the slam of the door and chink of keys echoing with our
footsteps along the corridor. We burst into the bright neon light
of the reception area and a woman in her late twenties rose to her
feet, her kohl-accented eyes flickering uncertainly.

‘
Hello, Paul.
Are you okay?’

I’d met Aisha
Dajani when we had signed the magazine deal. She and I had talked
on the phone since, finalising my secondment to the
Ministry.

‘
Yes, I think
so.’ I shivered violently. ‘I think I’ve been stupid.’

I felt
Ibrahim’s hand on my shoulder, caught a hit of sandalwood from his
cologne. ‘You will be okay, Paul. You are lucky. The driver
reported back to the Intercon and they rang Aisha.’

‘
My luggage?’
The question seemed daft even as I asked it, the threat of tears
pricking my eyes.

‘
The hotel
has it safely,’ Ibrahim said. ‘Come. There is some paperwork which
we cannot avoid but I think you can put this behind you. We have
some influence.’

He led me
into an office where a stout man in a braid-laced uniform slumped
behind a tatty desk. We sat on chairs set sideways against it and
separated by a coffee table as Ibrahim chattered to the man in
Arabic. I recognised the word Amjad the hotel driver had used for
journalist, ‘
sahafi’
being used several times. Ibrahim
lit a cigarette and offered one to the policeman, who took it and
lit up from Ibrahim’s lighter. They seemed to be negotiating
something. The officer fell silent, pulling a pad from a drawer and
painstakingly inserting carbon paper into the multipart form before
filling it out, his lips pursed in deliberate concentration. He
passed the form across to me, tapping it with his pen for me to
sign.

‘
What’s
this?’

Ibrahim
lowered his voice confidentially. ‘It is the charge sheet, Paul. It
is formality, but they want you to sign before they will release
you. We have agreed they will not press charges but they say you
were drunk and abusive, that you tried to assault a police officer.
This is serious offence.’

‘
What about
my passport? They took my passport.’

‘
We will get
it back. For now, you should sign this form.’

‘
It’s in
Arabic.’

He smiled,
his brown eyes on me. ‘You are in an Arab country, Paul. I think
you should sign it and we can follow this up with our good friend
Captain Mohammed later on.’

I
signed.

The policeman
took the form back and placed it in a file. He stood, his hand on
the file, and shook hands with Ibrahim, who said something to him
in Arabic. They both laughed before Ibrahim led me out of the
office. Aisha joined us as we went outside to Ibrahim’s car, the
street lights glittering on the Mercedes’ paintwork.

The stony
ground crunched as we pulled away from the police station. We
turned out onto the main road and Ibrahim glanced at me. ‘The hotel
driver said to thank you for trying to help him, Paul.
Bass
you have landed yourself in a lot of
khara
…
Aisha?’

‘
Hot water?’
I could hear the amusement in Aisha’s rich voice behind
me.

Ibrahim
frowned. ‘Yes, this is polite. Hot water. If the Ministry found out
about this problem they would be forced to take the action, perhaps
to cancel the contract with your company. They would at least, I
think, ask for your replacement.’

‘
I didn’t
mean to actually punch him. I just reacted because he was bullying
the driver. I don’t like bullies. Anyway, I missed. I never even
connected.’ I hated the querulous tone in my voice.

‘
It’s lucky
you didn’t,’ Aisha said. ‘But you’ve still caused a lot of trouble
for yourself.’

‘
I know, I
know. Thank you for helping me.’

Aisha sat
back. ‘What else could we do? I’m responsible for you and I’m
supposed to be helping you with the magazine. I’ve got to try and
make sure you don’t screw up.’ She waited a few seconds before
delivering the shot. ‘It looks like it’s going to be a big
job.’

I refused to
snap back at her. ‘I didn’t mean to cause all this. I just didn’t
think—’

‘
Khalas
. It is over
now,’ Ibrahim said. His eyes were on the dark road ahead, the
lights picking out the central reservation and concrete margin.
‘Try to remember you are in a foreign country, Paul. Things are not
always simple as they might seem. Stop worrying. We will get you to
your hotel and settled. You cannot tell anyone about this, not your
office in London and surely not anyone in the Ministry. We
will,
Insh’Allah
, let the
charges to be dropped in time. As far as the world can see, this
did not happen. You understand me?’

He glared
across at me and for a second the gloves were truly off. I nodded
back at him. ‘I understand. Thank you both.’

Aisha sighed
theatrically. ‘Don’t worry about it, Paul. I guess it’s all in a
day’s work.’

It was past
eleven by the time I got to my hotel room. I slung my bags onto the
bed and headed straight for the shower, where I scoured myself. The
damp stink of the cell clung to me, a dirt inside me as well as on
my skin and in my hair. Eventually I ran out of little bottles of
shampoo and gel and just stood under the hot stream of water,
letting the blessed torrent run over me as plastic bottles rolled
around my feet.

I forced
myself to make two phone calls, lying to both Anne and my mother so
they wouldn’t worry about me. I put my mobile on to charge then sat
on the bed in my hotel dressing gown. Eyes closed, I rocked back
and forth, reprising the day and my own stupidity, grateful beyond
words for my freedom.