OUTSIDE-IN: FOOTNOTES FROM A SQUINT-EYED GUESTWORKER
Martin Bennett

No other pedestrian in sight, I sidestep the spikes of another stumpy-trunked palmtree springing fully-armed from the pavement. Out along the four-lane dual carriageway predominantly American cars flash by on the planet’s cheapest petrol in a 24 Hour motor-race open to all males above the age of twelve. It makes a curious contrast with the shuttered stillness of narrower sidestreets where almost nothing moves, humanity having succumbed to the noonday heat. At last a bus. Except it’s in the outermost lane and speeding also. The windows of the women’s only compartment, I just have time to notice, are blacked out, presumably from the glances from quick-eyed males like myself. The back is marked: ‘Warning: Frequent Stopping’. I watch it vanish at 100 kilometres per hour into the sun-blanched distance.

Whatever enthusiasm I had on setting out vanishes through the soles of my desert boots. Excessive heat can, I begin to realise, have as depressive an effect as drizzle. With each step my mind computes opposites. Pedestrian versus driver. Foreigner versus local. Male versus female. Moslem versus non-Muslim. A block or two later and I have a grim inventory. The friction could be unbearable or revolutionary or both. Except, of course, for those trusty ball bearings: a tax-free salary higher than one could ever command back home; the diminishing numbers of hours, days, months until next leave; the delusion, however necessary, that ‘real life’ somehow lies elsewhere, elsewhere, elsewhere...

*

That here’s a country like no other becomes clear as soon as one enters the area for baggage collection. Three queues for men. Another for a line of unsmiling maidservants just landed from Indonesia. Headscarves religiously in place, their faces are set silently toward the future while, alongside, their Indian minder cracks jokes with an interested local. The outside world swings shut and now someone has applied the lock. The queues inch forward, stop as the passport officer disappears, reappears, disappears, is replaced by another who one minute stamps a passport, the next three minutes savours a cigarette.

The passport desk queues were long; those at Customs are longer still and growing. No random checks here, but a scrutiny of every suitcase, every cardboard box, hold-all, trunk, toilet bag. Compared to Immigration, the Customs personnel are alarmingly energetic. ‘What this? What this?’ the question echoes at intervals. Now a CD of Handel’s Messiah is taken away, now a video-cassette of Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. The Realm of the Forbidden has all at once increased its terrain. Out on the metal counter impounded copies of the Daily Mirror and the Sunday Times Colour Supplement lie beside ‘Prayers for Lent.’ Just beyond is a room banked with TV-screens. In front of one of them a strictly-bearded supervisor sits scowling at an episode of East Enders.

*

‘The goodly watermelon seller’: His wares stacked like ordnance from Eden. Pale green mantling deepest red ringed again and again with jet-black seeds as, now smacking it like drum, he heaves down a melon from the top, and in one muscled slice of knife surrenders it, slightly dripping, for our inspection.

*

Round and round our compound orbits the little brown-coloured jeep manned by two military policeman, also in brown, but with bright red caps. Each time I go out for some fresh air, there they are, following my every footstep. I turn right at the corner, seconds later they turn right as well. I swing left, they swing left. I do an abrupt U-turn. They stay put and as I walk past them, they demand to see my papers. I ask, as even-headedly as I can manage, whether walking is forbidden.

‘Babers, bring,’ they reply from the other side of the rolled-down glass.

I translate my question into a situational Arabic unenvisioned by my text-book with its smiling faces and hospitable cups of coffee.

‘Babers, bring,’ they reply.

I take my pass from my pocket.

They’re protecting me, it seems, from blowing up my own house.

The glare of their headlamps as I walk on. A limelight one could do without.

*

King Abulaziz ibn Saud, the nation’s founding father: In this most priggish of states, his reign provides a classic example of sex as politics by other means, wives then concubines as spoils/vehicles of conquest. (David Wallechinsky’s Book of Lists in our compound library has the King down as number 19 in his ‘23 Busiest Lovers in History’, claiming that ‘From the age of 11 to 72, the monarch had sexual relations with three different women every night - except during battles.’)

Now sixty, seventy years later his offspring, whether one or two generations removed, are numerous and self-multiplying enough to make up the government, both local and national. They also head most of the para-statals, the diplomatic corps, the directorships of several football clubs, each of the four amply-armed armed forces, the national Air Line, the Customs Service, etc, etc...

2000, 3000, 5000? The exact number of princes varies according to the report. Enough, anyway, to provide almost every street in the capital with a different name and still have some to spare.

*

In the open-air souq shampoo from Cyprus, al Bint Sudani perfume from London, henna marked Omdurman, Sudan. Jordanian figs, Guatemalan coffee, Spanish saffron. Some Thai high-heeled shoes; low-heels from Korea and Taiwan. Leathery red pomegranates by the literal bucketful. Also apricots, grapefruit, tangerines, some gigantic rough-skinned lemons. A variety of dates - from hard and fibrous like unripe plums to a deep gooey amber squashed into a solid block. Toilet rolls in see-through plastic sacks of fifty or a hundred. Some Dutch baby-milk, labels whitened from too much sun.

By one of the stalls a stocky white-bearded barrowboy waits with a green wheelbarrow. He’s here to earn a few more coins for his grandchildren the other side of the border, part of that impoverished country’s hand and muscle drain, one of Oil’s Have Nots.

*

After the hail, a thousand-thousand pocked vehicles, a boom in panel-beating such as comes once in several decades...

*

Turned away at the Zoo’s Gate, I’m informed, ‘Women Only’: Meanwhile, there beyond the mudbrick wall, apes and ostriches are exempt; two cockatoos flirt outrageously; Mr & Mrs Elephant touch trunks; a chimpanzee does something that’s better left unsaid; the python’s beyond suspicion...

*

Out in mid-desert oceanic dryness complete with swirl and ripple, its anemones long-turned to stone.

Now add a silence that you can hear: Immersed somewhere at its midst, life starting anew...

*

Another April/ Thu al-Hijjah - the nearest cloud several months away, on a delayed flight from the Caucasus or beyond. The compound swimming-pool a lozenge of iridescent blue squaring up to the surrounding swelter...

*

Dr Ibn Linah, the department despot with a PhD in fault-finding that here comes index-linked. Five to ten minutes every lesson, his face appears adjacent to the classroom window like some radio-active cheese; seems to disappear but is actually lurking at a sly diagonal, just out of view, only to reappear as the teacher changes position.

Come morning’s end the inevitable warning letter spell-checked and translated into coldest officialese by his expatriate henchman, then delivered with a faultless smirk to whomsoever it may concern.

The henchman safely cynical. The addressee’s paranoia proved all too true: He gazes down at his own language turned suddenly against him, and gauges the poison behind each euphemism; thinks about his recently accrued mortgage, about his soon-to-go-missing salary, about what on earth he is going to tell the wife and kids.

As the news filters through the staffrooms, each colleague thinking: There but for the grace of God go I...

*

Brown and leathery as a four-foot winklepicker, the giant lizard at the garage door: Our neighbour insists we give it water. Then a guard drives up in his Air Force jeep, grabs the creature’s tail, drives off with the prize ingredient for this evening’s pot.

*

Beneath such overweening space and heat, any green’s heroic, water a deep outsider. From afar cars dart mercury: Angular flashes, light redefining light, three to four mile glimmers, supersonic gleams.

If not the sandscape’s stars, at least its meteors - hubcaps, bumpers, windscreens trail photons by the billion. Sun as philosopher’s stone, discarded cans and bottles are plated silver and gold as trash turns precious. That stilt-legged water-tower becomes a Bedouin’s beacon. Flints flare skywards in simulated flight. So with one random blink solid prosaic inches get diffracted as far as sight can reach - quiddity unbound, free-floating as air, eclipsed by no recession.

*

Stop Press: Jelly-babies outlawed along with other sweets ‘in the form of worms, bones, teeth that might endanger the moralities of the nation’s youth...The Ministry of Commerce warns that merchants introducing such products in Kingdom must suffer the consequence in strict accordance with the regulations.’ Quote-Unquote.

Censor turned Surrealist? Zionists’ joke to bring their foes into disrepute?

No; cf. The Riyadh Daily, 1st Safar 1420, one more proof that fiction’s less strange than fact: Stretch virtue to insanity, and even candy can be certed X...

As yet unreported, the souq price of jelly-babies sky-rockets. In shadowy corners, sweet pushers keep an eye out for mutawwas. Back inside his pink palace Prince Sweetie-pie, top-secret supplier, corners one more profit...

*

The paving-slabs hot enough to fry an egg on, boulevards take a trip into the middle of nowhere, then stop. Between here and the horizon, Mars on earth: Rocks, sand, rocks, miles and miles of sameness, as far the eye can reach...

*

The round-about restaurant - olive salad, spiced kebabs, stuffed aubergines; a runny in-house pepper sauce overflowing its small steel plate; hubs of dough which a hot-faced baker with a long wooden spatula inserts into a furnace’s glowing innards, minutes later scoops out as flaky sweet-smelling discs of bread, each the size of a small tabletop. Talk about asbestos fingers! The man sets about his work like a pyromaniac made good, a stoker of appetites. To cool things down, several varieties of yoghurt; trays of cucumber; fish lying comfily on beds of lettuce; chilled bottles of strictly non-alcoholic beer wishing it were the real thing. Across the open kitchen fly shouts in Turkish, in Arabic, in Farsi, or is it Pushtu. The waiters are models of speed and courtesy, the clientele a miniature United Nations - an American, Arabs, Indians, Filipinos and Thais from the Pepsi-Cola factory down the street. Beside the exit a quietly beaming cashier takes in payments and hands out toothpicks.

*

The emir’s place floodlit and empty. Somewhere within, giant chandeliers from Venice; gold-plated taps and fittings; a marble forecourt that, so rumour has it, is washed daily with Chanel No 5.

Just outside, loose-lying porter-cabins - several guest-workers per single room.

*

04.32: The muezzin’s cry stretching from where earth and heavens meet.

A snug Nasrani, I doze on, my own prayers answered by this extra hour in bed...

*

Work's slings and arrows. "Let go, no clinging," lays down the Master of Zen. "Pull the chain on it," advises a colleague from Manchester to equally good effect.

*

Along King Fahd Expressway a six-mile tailback; the camel tethered a few trucks down flares its nostrils, shakes its head.

A few days ago three falcons perched on a speeding GMC’s rollbar and wondering beneath their leather hoods: How come we can now fly without a single flap of wings?

*

Just half an hour and sunset has repainted the whole of the white palace pink...

*

Men everywhere. As if by decree of some misogynistic djinni all the women turned to shadow. Or the few of them still visible. From souq to supermarket to gas station to adjacent mosque a relentless surplus of yang. The palm trees and lamp-posts and bollards male. The boulders. The tarmac. The flyover. The fences and spiked iron gates. All male. The various types of concrete. Male. The people in the restaurants and cafes and cassette shops and call-cabins, male, male, male. The police. The military. The staff of the newly-opened Body Shop. The personnel back at the airport. Even the vendor of bras and lingerie, male, with a wispy rather uncomely beard as proof.

*

After such expanses of sand and basalt this glut of neon winking ‘Dunkin’ Donuts’, ‘Kentucky Fried Chicken’, ‘MacDonald’, ‘Burger King’ in Arabic then Yankee script. So much for ‘A Thousand and One Nights’! Here Aladdin and his lamp is eclipsed, the exotic made corporate. Its glitz censored of cabaret and slot-machine, envisage instead some puritanical Las Vegas - men and more men sipping fruit juice, looking bored; and hardly a woman in sight; what pleasures exist, strictly for minors...

One more inner emigrant, I switch the car radio to 1323 MW and the BBC World Service and apply myself to elsewhere, elsewhere...

*

As the term drags on, the talk in the staffroom, between lectures, again turns to ‘hit lists’, ‘the chop’, dire chatter about ‘who will be next’.

One old timer cites the Arab proverb, ‘The executioner first strokes the head he wants to cut off.’ Then as a second thought adds, ‘The severed head does not dread the executioner.’

Through my own head, like a wishful mantra, ‘To leave, leave, leave!’.

Bank-manager, family, returnees all muttering: ‘Not yet, not yet...’

*

Wonder of Censorship no. 1: an idolatrous, now-beheaded garden gnome

No. 2: cigarette-burned hole marking the state of Israel, several cartons full of now uninflatable plastic globes

No. 3: The Wimbledon’s Women’s Final replayed on the Customs video monitor as a version of Crime Watch

No. 4: A copy of the Church Times, while Royally Imported Love Toys pass Customs by the crate full, express delivery, are even perhaps saluted along the way

No. 5: Across the front page of the Weekly Telegraph the many inked-out legs of the drum-majorettes at New York City’s Saint Patrick’s Day Parade

No. 6: Inside a cassette shop Elvis Presley’s Crying in the Black Out

No. 7 A: This incredible but true accolade to Barry Humphries’ artistry: From last Saturday’s Daily Mail a photo of Dame Edna Everage with deleted knees.

No. 7 B: Any of the 7 observations above, once it sees the light of print?!? So free speech, no longer as free as it might have hoped, gnaws on second thoughts, the virtues of anonymity...

*

‘First there was the pen.’ And true, the ban on images even in run-of-the-roadside hoardings is made up for by the swirling and speckled script. So beautiful one could imagine stars had swooped down to earth. By comparison its Roman equivalent seems almost mechanical...

Here at the traffic lights I match ‘ba’, ‘jiim’, ‘aleph’ with my Macmillan Arabic course. The meaning hidden somewhere underneath as in a kerbside dance of the seven veils. As the lights turn to green, my feet stuttering between brake and clutch; the rude bare of horns behind...

*

"Under a tyranny, whether the scale’s national or departmental, the best that one can aspire to is to go unnoticed," pronounces X, the old timer, before slipping back into his usual silence.

*

‘AFDO!’ goes Bruce, our staffroom’s talking calendar. Meaning ‘Another F...ing Day Over.’ In dire red felt-tip, one more number is obliterated from the company calendar on his patch of wall. Tomorrow and tomorrow like yesterday and yesterday, a sort of slaughter of days that will let up only with next leave.

*

‘Teacher, my father boor and no money for wife, not even half, what I do? Here in Saudi Arabia wife cost fifty-thousand riyal. What do me?’ laments Nawaf, the son of a local melon seller, as if wives came in such quantities. He buries his regulationally shaven head in his hands for a minute or so. Then, a few minutes later interrupts my flailing attempts to teach the Present Perfect, with the far more interesting suggestion, ‘Rubber doylies! Rubber doylies! Teacher, you go Bicadilly and buy me four. I give you sterling, no problem...’

*

To accompany the cultural festival this unofficial guide/inventory counter-balancing the official one: A thousand and one imported pick-ups; a greybeard hawking sandals, prayer-mats, brass pots and trays at thrice the price you can get them for down the souq; camels as valuable as any sports car, numbers painted across their necks; their twelve-year jockeys flown in from Somalia and Sudan for the occasion; guttural whoops and hollas no phonetic dictionary could equal; much heat and dust...

Women, meanwhile, are kept strictly within their enclosure. Dancing, if that’s the word, consists of all-male sword-wiggling. The only music’s a syncopated nasal wail as from someone in not particularly great pain. Equipped with a frown, a stick plus the regulation thobe hoisted up around his ankles, a ‘mutawwa’ patrols against any outbreak of over-enjoyment, impresario of grimness, frustration’s connoisseur.

Then the grand finale: The appearance of the King inside his gold-plated bus, a few dozen emirs in Bentleys, Mercedes, Lincolns bringing up the rear. Drive over, it’s time for the Camel Race at which by unwritten decree the King’s entrant always wins. Just to make sure his golden bus trails it from distant start to finishing post.

Back in the VIP tent diplomats and arms manufacturers rub shoulders, propose toasts in the most expensive lemonade, ponder what to do with their date-pips. A roving reporter with a microphone elicits favorable soundbites for this evening news...

*

"If the place is that intolerable as people make out,’ observes a wife over here on a family visit, "then how come they get so upset when any of them is forced to leave?"

*

Tired from four hours babbling, I decide to ease my way through the week’s last lesson by handing out magazines. ‘Don’t worry, they’re totally Hilal,’ Phil assures me during the break, handing over his pile of well-thumbed copies. I carry them down the corridor and into the class, two magazines per student. Frantic riffling of pages all round. Mayhem erupting in the second row as inside the British Airways Magazine someone spots a woman in a blacked-out swimming costume. For the sake of my salary, I quickly force myself into the role of a seventeenth century Puritan. If only I’d stuck with grinding out grammar, the Dismal Present, the Dismal Past, the Future Imperfect - anything but this. Elsewhere a Singapore Airways magazine with a picture of an air-hostess on the back disappears inside a student’s briefcase. Imagine a world championships in sexual frustration, and there’s little doubt about which country would win, goes one thought. Another foresees my being held responsible by some fundamentalist uncle of corrupting, like some tinpot Socrates, the nation’s youth. After a struggle I manage to wrest the magazine back.

Then the bell goes.

Another day negotiated...

*

After months of dryness, rain raising not-so-goodly scents from the sun-baked ground...

*

Wednesday through Friday: the Saudi weekend and the Internet Cafe is jam-packed. Like the phone lines as expatriate and local seek to establish contact with the world outside...

*

Origami for the ears, a stray locust whirrs between baking concrete, its swarm moved on. Brown, grey, brown are the only colours, all shadows stunted and growing shorter by the minute. The nearest green is beyond the skyline - a hostage to heat and dust, the beetling sun.

*

For the evening’s diversion my umpteenth walk around the compound: Eight feet of wall on one side, on the other not so much a landscape as the floor of a seemingly endless quarry set with more compounds with eight-foot walls which sometimes for variety I walk round also. Three, four times maybe, in a rectangular anti-clockwise orbit. Does life as we know it exists within? Behind the mud-daubed concrete it’s hard to tell. The heavy-duty metal gates - now iron, now steel, now a heftily-embossed bronze - give little clue either.

‘Mars on earth,’ the phrase again springs to mind; walking as an exercise in outsiderdom; the odd glimmer of neon to stop such thoughts from getting too far-fetched...

Sneaking up behind comes that little Airforce Jeep, 8 miles per hour to my own 5, its engine so quiet that first only the headlamps show it’s there. I brace myself for the usual "Bass, bring." This time, however, the Jeep just glides alongside then proceeds on into the gloom like a slow-motion space-capsule. I, for my part, head back home with the sense that solitude here is never quite as solitary as it seems. Tinkle, tinkle, go my desert boots against bits of shale. Three compounds orbited already, and the night is still young. Overhead, detaching itself from the ambient stars, the tail-light of a passing plane sets me calculating the days till next leave. Rio, Rome, Athens, Dakar - I shuffle destinations like some middle-aged Aladdin whose carpet is in the garage, awaiting a crucial spare part.

*

The government in Russia may be tottering; war may have broken out in countries x, y, and z. Yet the main items on this evening’s bulletin is are that the King has sent the Sultan of Brunei a royal greetings telegram on the occasion of his birthday, how Prince A, was received earlier in the day at Prince International Airport by Prince B and C and D, how Prince E opened a new football stadium: The subtext: No news is good news, all’s right with the world.

*

Cinema and theatre both banned, we make do instead with uncensored sunsets, clouds free as the air which moves them.

Or to put it another way: ‘Forbidden, forbidden,’ yabbers meddling man; Nature, thank heavens, quietly lets be...

*

Segregation recurring: Walls and more walls - writ small across them with an imaginary spraygun: ‘Boredom Rules, Okay?’ That, or smouldering resentment at being so comprehensively excluded: Them versus Us set in ten-foot-high concrete, guarded at every gate.

*

Crackling from a minaret’s loud-speaker, the imam’s rant reaches a xenophobic climax and rips the noontime quiet to shreds. Foreigners huddled around a nearby fountain feel their foreignness growing more foreign by the minute, count days, bank-accounts, mortgages...

*

Females all wrapped and veiled, such allure in bangled ankles, a passing flash of nails.

*

‘Whenever I return from leave I always have this vision of the place burned to the ground.’

‘Now whatever might prompt a thought like that?"

But next comes the worry, where then would they send us to teach? Probably out on the scalding tarmac. One’s every gesture open to scrutiny and misinterpretation. Then our Great Leader up in some air-conditioned apartment building close by and watching us with binoculars, taking down notes for his next memo: 'During 6th lesson today you were observed fainting in front of your class. Ref. Company Policy Document, Clause 27B, this constitutes a serious dereliction of duty... '

*

A nubile bit of cumulus flaunting all it’s got - the mutawwa below

wagging their canes in horror, powerless to intervene.

*

‘Employees are reminded that consumption of alcoholic beverages is strictly forbidden by the laws of the host nation. Any individual found guilty of such an offence will be liable to summary dismissal and deportation from the Kingdom, not ruling out sixty lashes and an indefinite period of imprisonment.’ - Company Circular 417

*

‘......, ....., ..... received today the Divine Punishment,’ the newscaster with a neo-Oxonian accent brings the Friday night bulletin to a close with a dire amalgam of vowels.

Next morning at work a colleague - and witness to the above - tells us that as a foreigner he’d been given an honorary seat at the front. The victims, evidently drugged, were led out into the square, forced to kneel, then dispatched. The ensuing hush made more dreadful still by the observation that one of the heads had not been completely severed.

Memories of a Somali in Rome narrating how he’d visited the Kingdom to perform hajj. Arriving in Jeddah, he also witnessed the ‘divine punishment’. ‘The experience gave me nightmares not only during the period of pilgrimage, but for months afterwards. The blessing of peace which the hajj is supposed to bring with it vanished there and then, with a flash of the executioner’s sword.’

*

Scarcely a bush in miles, my eyesight’s magnetised by plain horizon, there refocused beyond its ambit of habitual shift and clutter. Proving flatness can be otherwise, light then more light clears the mind of words while silence, amplified, camps out along where sky and landmass meet.

*

‘BENCH-MARK GOAL RELATED STRATEGIES’; ‘WORKING WITHIN KEY-OBJECTIVE AREAS’: So goes the blurb of the prospectus in what must be some of the most expensive print ever. Meaning, down here at the chalk face, trying to teach the Present Continuous to groups of students whose main interest is catching up on last night’s lost sleep; more and more desperate appeals of ‘Wake up, please, Abdullah; Rajah, wake up’; the inevitable face just beyond the door.

*

Midnight. I am ferried sleepwards by the air conditioner's hum.

*

’Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.’ Although this time the bell is in the form of a letter ref. ‘Classroom Supervision’, and now faultlessly delivered by the expatriate henchman mentioned earlier. The edge of his mouth twists into a smile that seems to say, ‘We all have the strength to bear the misfortunes of others.’

‘It has been observed that...’ reads the print. Then a series of allegations about ‘seriously inappropriate teaching materials’, ‘students’ sleeping’, ‘an inaccurate bulletin board’, the job-ending conclusion...

‘Sticks and stones may hurt my bones,’ my memory accelerates decades backwards. The bell tolls?!? I still have life, good health and perceptions intact - and now a free one-way ticket out of here on tomorrow’s plane. Wasn’t that what I wanted all along? Or dreaded, wanted, dreaded, wanted in varying degrees...

Ok, the British commandment - ‘Thou shalt not lose thy job’ - has been broken. So what? ‘The severed head does not dread the executioner,’ the Arabic proverb echoes like some antique commentator who has seen far worse. After shock comes relief. Another voice urging, Smile, smile for all your worth. ‘If you can meet arrival and departure and treat those impostors just the same, then you are a man, my son...’ ‘To envisage circumstance all calm, such is the top of sovereignty.’ Quote-unquotes below which my own crisis shrinks to a suddenly manageable size. Less a crisis than the answer to a prayer.

Perhaps I should go to Dr Linah’s office and proffer, along with a farewell, my heart-felt thanks. Only, of course, he has already left; his office is locked for the weekend...

*

Back at the airport. On the left, behind some ten-foot railings, stands a mosque, its floodlit dome like a moon that been hawsered to earth then streamlined. On the right illegally parked cars are being hitched to a couple of police tow-trucks. Arrivals. Departures. Behind the automatic doors an overalled platoon of South Asian porters guard a monopoly on the heavy-duty trolleys. Men in the standard white thobes and red-chequered ghutras. Women in darkest black, some with faces, others on first sight with no faces at all. The sole concession to the world elsewhere is a papercup marked Pepsi with an inbuilt-straw held deftly below the veiled chin.

Praying here being something mostly done in public, a variably-long row of men kneel before a marble wall set with two lifts whose gleaming steel doors recycle the neon number of this or that departure gate as an illegible red streak. The men touch the ground three times with their heads. Then stand. Then bow. Close by, three youths walk past in trainers and baseball caps; a guest worker sells bottled water, fruit-juice, coffee, more and more cigarettes.

In the waiting areas the passengers maintain an eerie quiet; the only conversation observable is into a mobile phone. Yet everyone seems to know exactly what to do next, their comings and goings as if by clockwork. Down at the prayer wall a man starts chanting. ‘Passengers for Bombay proceed to Gate 36,’ crackles the intercom. Then, ‘Passengers to Rome and...’ The cue to put away my notebook, departure at last becoming fact...

*

Chaucer’s Troilus, transported to the Seventh Sphere, there began to despise this little patch of earth. Looking down on Zenobia, I feel something of the same thing; albeit the place, stretching its crinkled shades of brown beneath either wing, still seems dauntingly large. And still after an hour’s flying time the drinks trolley has not been wheeled out, an airline legality in deference to the Host Nation. On the plus side I am, unlike Troilus, most definitely alive, with a keen thirst to prove it.

Then through the high-tech plastic overhead comes an announcement: ‘Passengers might be interested to know that we’re now leaving Zenobian airspace.’ I imagine the pilot’s face lit by a mischievous grin. ‘Do enjoy the rest of your flight...’

In response up goes a cheer from the row behind. The long awaited trolley is rolled into action, the person wheeling them unequivocally female. The same for the uncensored figure on the label of the wine bottle she now passes in my direction - ‘Aphrodite.’ From two seats down drifts a hint of perfume. Yin, thank heavens, regained.

Neither guest nor worker, I look up at the map on video screen to verify that the plane has not changed direction. Headed by a small red arrow, the flight path crosses from Syria to Lebanon, out over the Mediterranean and home, home, home.

To savour better the taste of red wine in my throat, I close my eyes. Such sweet dark: Across it Zenobia and all its legalisms shrunk to a glimpses vanishing backwards in time, a sort of cartoon verite, material for a travelogue which now no censors can get at...

Martin Bennett's collection of poems, Loose Watches, was published by University of Salzburg Press. He has had three stories read on BBC World Service and other work appears in Stand, Poetry Ireland Review and Dalhousie Review.