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Widdy becomes Churchillian Prime Minister in book

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Ann Widdecombe for Prime Minister? Only if Armageddon comes many may say – but that’s exactly what happened in a new comical book.

Author David Gee has penned just such a scenario in his book of Middle East meltdown – Shaikh-Down.

He said: “I see the world destroying itself and Ann Widdecombe becomes our esteemed Prime Minister.

“I think she would be a great PM and make Margaret Thatcher look like Mary Poppins.

“She is always on the side of right, and doesn’t always let party political wrangling get in the way.”

And Miss Widdecombe herself is delighted.

She laughed and said: “I always wanted to Prime Minster and now I am glad I am, even if it’s only in fiction.”

Ann Widdecombe MP

The 61-year-old Conservative MP for Maidstone and the Weald is stepping down at the next General Election, having first won the seat in 1987.

When it was pointed out that there was not much of a world left after the nukes finished their work, she sighed and said: “Yeah, well. That’s probably the only world where I would be Prime Minster.”

Even with the chance of leading Britain in the future looming thanks to the book, Miss Widdecombe still says she is leaving politics.

She said: “I don’t think I will be tempted to stay on with that hope.”

And of the comparison to Mrs Thatcher, Miss Widdecombe said: “I don’t think anyone could make Margaret Thatcher look like Mary Poppins but I am very flattered by the comparison.”

Risking a possible jihad on himself, Mr Gee, from Newhaven, sees the Middle East imploding amid tales of excessive sex and petrodollars.

He said: “There are revolutions all over the Arab world and a little event called Armageddon in this book, which is a comedy.

“Ann Widdecombe becomes our Prime Minister. Although I don’t go into a lot of detail about her, I do call her redoubtable and Churchillian.

“I have emailed her with details of the book, but she has not got back to me yet – hope she is not too upset with me.”

As for being described as Churchillian, she said: “Oh, very nice, too.”

Summing up the book, Mr Gee said: “On the Persian Gulf island of Belaj, Egyptian belly-dancers and British air-hostesses are working overtime to relieve randy Arabs of their frustrations and their petrodollars.

“One of the punters is murdered: whisky-soaked publisher Farouk whose nymphomaniac wife Nayla is a niece of the local despot, His Highness Shaikh Khalid al-Khazi.

“Newcomer Cass, an east London housewife, becomes a US $500 hooker. Sammy-Jo, an American stewardess with Page-3-girl boobs and nerdy British banker Eddy are drawn into a plot by BARF, the Belaj Armed Revolutionary Front, to assassinate the Amir in a bizarre bedroom romp.”

Shaikh-Down can be ordered from UK bookshops, price £6.99, or online at www.amazon.co.uk.

Source: http://www.kentnews.co.uk

Sodden with whisky and fresh from a belly-dancer’s elastic embrace, Farouk Bahzoomi drove home to his wife in the middle of a mid-September night.

Fifty-two years old, Farouk was a figure of some minor significance in one of the Arab world’s most insignificant states. He owned and edited Al-Khabar, the national daily newspaper of the island of Belaj; he also owned the weekly English-language Belaj Gazette. His neglected wife was a niece of the emirate’s ruler.

The belly-dancer’s name was Leila. A dusky twenty-year-old from Cairo, she worked for Mrs Fadilah, a fellow Egyptian of indeterminate age who operated the island’s only ‘house of toleration’. To the music of two finger-drummers and one player of the oud (a plangent Arab version of the lyre or balalaika), Leila undulated up and down her mistress’s Kashmiri-carpeted salon, whirling the tassels adhered by sorcery to her pomegranate breasts.

Seated on mattresses against the walls, the punters (all Arabs and mostly local) competed for her favours by tucking bank notes of increasing value into the waistband of her golden G-string. Tonight Farouk made what his rivals conceded as the winning bid for Leila’s services when he folded three 1,000-dirham notes (each worth a little over £200) into the taut gold cord.

Leila went to sit beside him on the mattress and they polished off a bottle of Johnny Walker Black Label before retiring to a more private mattress in another room. Here, after brief but intensive exertion on Leila’s part and for a total outlay roughly equivalent to the monthly wages of his entire Asian printing staff, Farouk precipitately splashed her mahogany loins.

This might not strike you, O Gentile reader, as – you will pardon the pun – a very satisfactory outcome, but it was a sated as well as a thoroughly sozzled Farouk Bahzoomi who weaved his way home in his treasured and much dented Rolls Royce Continental from Mrs Fadilah’s box-like villa behind the British Club to the eclectically designed house his dowry had purchased in Medina Khalid, Belaj City’s poshest suburb. Parking haphazardly outside the high rendered walls, Farouk left the headlights on full beam as he lurched out into the humid night air and tottered over to the wrought-iron gates.

He didn’t know it but he was about to pay for his manifold sins and, in the process, catalyse a chain of events with repercussions beyond the shores of this tiny island. More immediately and of only incidental relevance, he would make the front page of both his newspapers.

Death stood waiting in the shadow of Farouk’s mock-Crusader walls. Death stepped into the headlight beam and touched him on the shoulder as he fumbled at his Moorish-Gothic gates. Farouk turned with a gasp and stared into the face of Death, a plump and buck-toothed face framed in a white headdress. Unlike Farouk’s, Death’s long white robe was spotless and leather-belted at the waist.

‘Peace upon you, Farouk bin Abdul Bahzoomi,’ Death addressed him formally.

‘And upon you also, noble stranger,’ Farouk replied in the same vein. Belching, he tasted sour forbidden whisky in his throat. ‘Praise God,’ he beg-pardoned. ‘But you are not a stranger. I know you. Your name is –’

‘Death.’

Farouk gasped again and took two steps backward until his fat bottom came up against the silver-plated grille of his cherished Rolls Royce. ‘How can this be?’ he stammered. ‘Surely your name is -’

‘My name is Death,’ the other insisted. ‘You think you know me because one summer in my ignorant youth I bound the bales of that corrupted wood pulp wherein you fawn upon the usurpers of this island and their allies in the lands of the Great Satan. Then I was Hassan, but tonight I am Death to you, Farouk bin Abdul Bahzoomi, you blaspheming whoreson spawn of a buggerer of sheep and camels.’ Arabic is a majestic language in which to flatter or to revile.

On Sunset Boulevard and on Piccadilly, driving, as tonight, under the influence, Farouk had been called ‘dickhead’ and ‘wanker’ by other motorists and had accepted the epithets as his due. But now he quivered with outrage as well as with fear.

‘How dare you address me in this profane calumnious fashion?’ he spluttered, clinging to his dignity.

‘I address you thus because you are a propagator of cringing putrid falsehoods and a kisser of the fundaments of those who pollute the land of my blessed forebears.’

‘On the contrary, I am -’

But Death did not wait on Farouk’s expostulations. ‘Go now,’ said Death, and from a scabbard at his waist he unsheathed a knife with a short curved blade like a scimitar and plunged it into Farouk’s broad chest.

‘Allaaaah!’ cried Farouk, as if hoping to redeem decades of dissipation by calling on his Maker even as he was dispatched into his Maker’s presence. In a last mindless act of lechery he clutched the semi-nude silver nymph on top of the car’s radiator; then his chubby fingers lost their hold and he slid to the compacted sand that was the topsoil of his driveway.

Death – or Hassan, to call him by his discarded name – bent down and retrieved his khanjar from the chest of Farouk Bahzoomi, wiped it on the dead man’s robe and replaced it in its scabbard. Then taking the flowing corners of his headdress, he knotted it into a washerwoman’s bundle on top of his head before climbing onto his motorcycle which was parked a few yards away, where the kerb would be if Belaj boasted kerbs and pavements.

‘It begins,’ he murmured to himself. ‘There will be more. Insh’Allah.’ If God wills.

His night’s work completed, Death – Hassan – roared off into the humid darkness.

[Hassan flees to Egypt but he will return to Belaj– in drag! – with the Amir as his next target.]

************************************************************************************************

Chapter One: In-Flight

2,000 kilometres to the north-west, ten and a half kilometres above sea level (and the level of Farouk Bahzoomi’s blood-soaked driveway), a Belaj Air 737, flight number BJ027, whispered south-eastward through the indigo night sky. Many of those on board would be engaged to a greater or lesser degree in the events set in motion by Farouk’s Shakespearean demise.

Monitored by a bleary-eyed Belaji first officer, the autopilot was in control of the plane. The captain, Doug Richards, an English expatriate with twenty years flying experience, was squeezed into one of the First Class toilets behind the flight deck in the company of a senior stewardess named Monica, a thirty-something brunette.

Erect in both senses, the captain stood between Monica’s cellulite thighs in the cramped toilet. His uniform trousers and BHS boxer shorts were concertinaed at his ankles. Monica’s Calvin Klein bikini pants lay crumpled on the floor. Her feet, in airline-issue low-heeled shoes, rested against the bulk-head just below the ceiling. Her buttocks overflowed the tiny hand basin; the soap dispenser was digging uncomfortably into her waist. As she lifted herself into a less painful position, unthinkingly hastening the captain’s gasping ejaculation into a Durex Fetherlite, the aircraft hit a pocket of turbulence.

The captain, his latex-sheathed organ providing a fulcrum for most of Monica’s nine stone eleven, lurched backwards and sideways and slammed into the door, whose lock promptly gave way. Borne down by the weight of his partner, Doug Richards fell through the opening door and landed on his back in the narrow aisle. His head thumped with concussing force into the door of the vacant opposite toilet.

‘Chrrrist!’ he yelled, fighting unconsciousness.

Monica, now straddling in a herniating embrace the one part of him that was still vertical, experienced the most intense orgasm of her closer-to-forty-than-she-cared-to-admit years.

‘Jeeesus!’ she cried through clenched teeth.

In the front row of First Class a male head, white-shrouded and crowned with a twist of black braiding, turned at the sound of a loud thud followed by invocations to the Christian Messiah who is known to Muslims as the Prophet Issa. Aisle curtains and an untended galley obstructed Shaikh Ibrahim bin Sayed al-Khazi’s view of the pagan spectacle.

The engineer, another British expat, opened the flight deck door. His mouth also opened and could be expected to re-open often in the hours and days ahead. Doug Richards’s belated induction into the Mile-High Club would become part of the legend of Belaj Air.

***

The only other passenger in First Class, seated three rows behind Shaikh Ibrahim, vaguely registered the commotion at the front of the aircraft, but Tariq Bahzoomi, nephew of the newly deceased newspaper-owner, had other things on his mind. Dressed in a grey Armani business suit, Tariq, already running to the family flab at thirty-three, was trying to get his rocks off at 35,000 feet. This idea had obsessed him since he first saw the movie Rich and Famous on TCM.

‘Come on, darling,’ he urged the shapely brunette in the next seat. ‘Just some head will do.’ Tariq prided himself on his command of English.

‘I can’t,’ the girl said. ‘If we’re caught, I’ll lose my job.’

‘Job, schmob. I’ll get you a job with one of my dad’s outfits.’

‘I’ve got my future to think of.’

‘Future, schmuture.’ Tariq was beginning to overdo the showbiz Yiddish. ‘Don’t you want to join the Mile-High Club, Bettina?’

Bettina shrugged inside her green-and-orange Belaj Air uniform blouse. ‘Not here, not now,’ she admitted.

‘If not here, where, for Christ’s sake?’

Bettina wondered if this was the time to tell him that she’d been initiated into the Mile-High Club last year in a Business Class toilet by an Italian structural engineer. Probably not, she decided. The Italian, married of course, had been a hunk but the experience was a shade less glamorous than in Rich and Famous. Jacqueline Bisset isn’t seen to have bruised her hip on the tap fitting or to have lost a pair of Janet Reger panties down the loo; nor, at least not on the sound track, does her bottom come out of the sink with a plop like breaking jelly.

Bettina had been Tariq Bahzoomi’s girlfriend for the past four months. Half an hour ago he’d bought her a $2,000 Piaget watch from the duty-free selection, an investment on which he now seemed to expect a quick return.

Receiving no answer to his question, Tariq sighed and said, ‘OK, make it a quick hand-job.’ And he pulled her diamond-watch-wristed hand towards the bulge disfiguring the pelvis of his Armani suit. Bettina tweaked the top of the protrusion firmly between her thumb and forefinger, a stratagem her sister had picked up at self-defence classes. The bulge subsided dramatically.

‘Jesus H. Christ,’ bellowed Tariq, his Harvard Business School English not letting him down under pressure.

***

In the front row Shaikh Ibrahim’s head swivelled through almost 180 degrees at this third summons to the prophet Issa which was neither entirely appropriate nor entirely inappropriate in an aircraft whose flight path included the sand-swept lava plateau between the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. He glared across the empty seats at his brother-in-law’s nephew, a useless playboy whose presence on the flight he had acknowledged with no more than a brief nod when they boarded.

Among several posts in which Ibrahim bin Sayed served his uncle the Amir of Belaj he was the island’s Commandant of Traffic Police. His sister Nayla was, though she didn’t know it yet, the widow of Farouk Bahzoomi.

These persistent blasphemous exclamations were interrupting a near-sacrilegious train of thought in the mind of Shaikh Ibrahim bin Sayed al-Khazi. He had been fantasising about the houris, the ‘chastely amorous’ wenches with which the Muslim Paradise promises to be liberally staffed. Ibrahim wanted them all to be built like another of BJ027’s stewardesses, a platinum blonde whose breasts were simply mega (Arabic is untypically deficient in this connoisseur area, and Tariq wasn’t the only Belaji with a command of English idiom); her breasts were ‘yummy’ and ‘scrummy’ and totally edible.

Some men are leg men, some are arse men. Ibrahim was a major-league boob man. His very personal video collection (he was also Head of Customs: all sorts of goodies came his way) included the complete works of Russ Meyer and Dolly Parton. He liked breasts that were prominent – let’s face it, he liked them big – but he preferred them to look natural, unaugmented. On his last night in the Hyde Park Hilton he had discovered a bizarre reality TV show, set on a much lusher island than Belaj; a girl with the enticing name of Abi Titmuss had displaced Marilyn Monroe at the top of Ibrahim’s tit-parade.

‘Is there anything I can get you, Shaikh Ibrahim?’ Bettina enquired as she made a detour past his seat en route from her wounded lover to the Business Class section. Ibrahim briefly pondered several replies he could make to this query.

‘No, thank you very much.’ His voice was guttural.

‘You’re welcome.’ Bettina’s mouth, lipsticked by Estée Lauder, parted in a polite but not perfunctory smile, and she moved on. The Commandant of Traffic Police and Head of Customs, who had chain-smoked throughout the flight, lit another cigarette and returned to his reverie of the Gardens of Paradise.

***

The object of Ibrahim’s mental dalliance was called Sammy-Jo-Ann and known, conveniently, as Sam. She was 28 (the same age as her new admirer) and she hailed from Pittsburgh: almost Dolly Parton territory.

While the Economy passengers were sleeping or watching the movie and the First Class passengers were variously tumescing or detumescing, Sam was sitting with her feet up in the rear of the untenanted Business Section. Next to her was Janice, another Economy stewardess whom airline grooming had not rescued from plainness.

Bettina joined them, plumping herself down in the seat across the starboard aisle from Sam.

‘Men are vile,’ she announced. Sam was quick to agree:

‘Honey, if I got all the men in my life into a herd, I’d have me a hog farm bigger than any in Kentucky!’

‘My Colin isn’t vile,’ protested Janice, who never missed a chance to sing the praises of this paragon.

‘We all know your Colin is the Prince Charmin’ of Twat-ford.’

‘Watford.’

‘Whatever. Who’s gotten you mad, honey?’ Sam asked Bettina. ‘Did that Shaikh person get fresh? When I took him a hot towel after dinner he had a hard-on inside that shirt thing they wear like a log goin’ over Niagara Falls.’ As she laughed, the buttons of her green-and-orange blouse strained against the thrust of their cantilevered contents in a way that the ‘Shaikh person’ would particularly have savoured.

‘It’s not him. It’s that foul Tariq. He was trying to get me to – you know – do things in First Class.’

Janice looked shocked. Sam did not. ‘The Mile High Club! Go for it, Bettina.’

Bettina smirked. ‘I already did. A year ago.’

‘In the john?’ Bettina nodded. Sam’s breasts went into overdrive as she shuddered with laughter. ‘Did your ass come outta the sink with a noise like a wet fart?’ The way she said the last word was onomatopoeic. Janice shuddered, but not with laughter. Bettina shook her head.

‘Nothing like that. It was pure magic. Just like in the movie.’

‘The one with Jackie Bisset? Well, the guy I screwed on a flight out of Houston -’ Janice winced – ‘I had bruises right up my spine and my snatch was sore for a week!’ Sam laughed some more. If Ibrahim knew what he was missing.

Janice’s pursed lips now resembled a clenched anus. Bettina put a hand over her own mouth to hide another smirk and Sam noticed the glittering watch on her wrist. ‘Is that new?’

‘Tariq bought it for me tonight.’

‘No wonder he wanted you to do some stuff! Well, who’s a lucky girl? Nobody ever gave me a diamond watch.’

‘I’ve got three of them,’ said Bettina, looking smug.

‘Yes, but look what you have to do to get them,’ Janice contributed. Bettina’s mouth opened, but Sam got in first:
‘Go piss up a rope, Janice. She doesn’t do anythin’ you don’t do with your precious Colin for a Big Mac and a seat at the movies. Grab it while it’s goin’, Bettina. Best I ever got was a pair of earrings off a PanAm captain one time. Oh yes -’ more laughter, more strain on her buttons – ‘and a ground engineer at Houston gave me crabs!’

***

A female passenger lay stretched across the four centre seats in the front row of Economy behind the partition separating it from Business Class. Headphoneless, not watching the flickering screen above her, she seemed to be asleep. In fact she was awake and listening to the conversation on the other side of the partition.

Cass McBride had been to Belaj before, for holidays. Her brother was the editor of the Belaj Gazette. But this time Cass wasn’t coming on holiday. She was running away. She didn’t know what the future held in store for her (and wouldn’t have believed it if she did). So far – it was only (she kept looking at her watch) six hours since she’d left Walthamstow – she didn’t feel unduly bothered. What she mainly felt was free.

The loose-fitting tracksuit she wore for in-flight comfort (and modesty in strait-laced Belaj) gave little hint of the figure it contained. Her hair was light brown with ash highlights, and at forty-four she still had the clear complexion of her Highland childhood. She could have claimed to be thirty-eight (not that she did) and got away with it.

She envied the stewardesses. Not the mousy one with the boyfriend in wherever Twatford was and a voice that was inaudible over the engine noise. But she envied the pretty brunette who seemed to have met a lot of generous rich men and she even envied the platinum blonde with the overlarge bust who sounded as if she’d enjoyed, in her earthy way, putting herself about quite a bit.

Cass hadn’t put herself about much. Cass hadn’t put herself about at all. Her husband had never given her a diamond watch, and she doubted that he’d ever given one to any of his girlfriends. He’d also managed not to give her crabs, for which, she thought with a grim smile, she ought perhaps to be grateful.

Never mind all that, she told herself: you’re free now. Things are going to change.

No, they’re not, another part of her mind whispered. It’s too late for change. This whisper was, almost, her mother’s voice. Your goose was cooked a long time ago, my girl.

Go and piss on a rope, she told this voice, blushing as she permitted herself to think in the same crude terms as the foul-mouthed blonde stewardess.

***

‘Back to the galley, slaves,’ urged the chief steward, cracking an imaginary whip down the Business Class aisle at the chattering trio in the back row.

‘It’s too soon to start breakfasts,’ protested Bettina. ‘The movie won’t finish for another half an hour.’

‘Hardly anyone’s watching it anyway,’ Janice put in.

‘Why do they cut so much out of them?’ asked Sam. ‘Myself, I like to see plenty of bedroom action.’

‘I could give you all the bedroom action you can handle,’ the chief steward told her. ‘Make you a very rich girl, too. The bigger the boobs, the bigger the bucks.’ A short tubby man in his mid-forties with cropped grey hair, his name was Felix ffrench; he always stammered the double consonant – ‘f-french’ – and got very cross if his surname was spelt with a single capital ‘F’. He operated a lucrative sideline that made him a rival of Belaj’s Mrs Fadilah, although the girls who worked for Felix were rarely called on for any belly-dancing. Sam had so far resisted conscription.

‘Sorry, honey,’ she told him now. ‘There’s no way I could turn tricks for money. I don’t mind screwin’ creeps but I have to believe in the creeps I’m screwin’.’ Janice winced again. Bettina smiled (as, on the other side of the partition, did Cass McBride).

‘Well,’ Felix riposted, ‘that’s one hell of a creep you’re screwing these days.’

‘Blow it out your ass, Felix.’

Felix cracked his invisible whip again. ‘Back to work, you idle scrubbers.’

‘Who you calling a scrubber, you bloody poofter?’ Janice revealed a rarely seen streak of belligerence. It was unwise to take on Felix ffrench at verbal abuse.

‘Who are you calling a poofter, you scrawny ugly cow?’

‘Now-now, ladies,’ Bettina intervened. ‘Remember we like to run a happy ship.’ In his pre-flight cabin crew briefing Felix always made reference to ‘a happy ship’. Now he screwed his mouth into a moue.

‘Send Dawn and Melissa up here,’ he told Bettina. ‘They can put their feet up for ten minutes before breakfast.’

‘I heard it was their legs they like to get up!’ Sam cackled at her own joke, then pretended to cower as Felix raised his whip arm.

***

Now 1,450 kilometres to the south-east of Belaj Air flight 027, the body of Farouk Bahzoomi had been discovered. The Pakistani gardener, who lived in a shed in the grounds, went to investigate the unremitting glare of headlights through the gates and saw his master crumpled in a puddle of blood beside his imperial, not to say imperialist, Rolls Royce.

‘Aiyee!’ screamed the gardener and ran to hammer on the door of one of the cubicle-sized rooms which housed the domestic staff above the garage. A bleary-eyed Indian houseboy emerged clad only in a sarong; he could make no sense of the gardener’s babbling in the Pashto language of the North-West Frontier. Seizing the houseboy by one arm, the gardener dragged him downstairs and over to the gates.

‘Aiyee!’ screamed the houseboy and ran into the main house via the kitchen door. Upstairs a Filipina maid slept on a mattress on the floor outside her mistress’s bedroom. The boy knelt and shook her awake. The domestic staff used pidgin English to overcome the language barrier, but violent death was not in the maid’s vocabulary. Copying the gardener’s example, the houseboy dragged the girl in her crumpled nightdress over to a hall window overlooking the entrance. The gardener had opened the gates and was intoning prayers over the plump sprawl of Farouk’s body.

‘Aiyee!’ screamed the maid and ran back to the bedroom door, which she flung open. The houseboy hung back for fear of glimpsing his mistress in a state of dishabille. Actually Nayla Bahzoomi slept in what in Egypt constituted male day-wear, a striped dishdasha in heavy cotton that provided insulation against the overcool central air-conditioning. Farouk had not approved of his wife’s mannish night attire which he’d only infrequently seen removed.

The maid’s screams woke Nayla before the girl could reach her and when the girl did reach her, still screaming, Nayla sat up and slapped her, not too harshly, across the face. The screaming subsided into sobs. The houseboy appeared, tentatively, in the doorway, his head lowered.

‘Excuse me, Madam,’ he began hesitantly.

‘What’s the matter?’ Nayla demanded. Her English was near perfect and accentless. ‘Look at me when you speak to me.’

The boy raised his head.

‘Madam, they have killed Sir,’ he blurted.

‘Who has? Where?’

‘I don’t know, Madam. Outside the gate, Madam,’ he took care to answer each of her questions.

‘Show me,’ his mistress ordered. The half-naked boy entered the room and she allowed him to lead her to a window.

Nayla was tall, olive-skinned, voluptuous, at twenty-six two years younger than her brother Ibrahim and exactly half her husband’s age, a feminist intellectual in a society that tended to ignore women and mistrusted intellectuals.

She did not scream when she saw her husband lying like a beached porpoise on the dark-stained sand in the undimmed headlights of his ostentatious Rolls Royce (Nayla drove a discreet Mercedes coupé with smoked-glass windows). The gardener had been joined by the Moroccan cook and the Bengali laundrywoman who cohabited in the cubicle next to the houseboy’s. The multinational trio prayed and keened over the corpse of Farouk Bahzoomi.

‘Are you sure he’s dead?’ Nayla demanded of the trembling boy beside her.

‘There is much blood, Madam.’

Nayla sighed, which the houseboy took for an upper-caste Arabic demonst-ration of controlled grief. But grief was not what the new widow felt. Her marriage had been arranged between her brother and the Bahzoomis, whose wealth was second only to that of the ruling al-Khazi clan. Nayla had despised her husband in life – his gambling and drinking, his belly-dancing whores, his newspapers that kissed the backside of her uncle the Amir – and she felt only relief at his passing, however brutal it seemed to have been.

Lifting a telephone from the table by the window she called the hospital to summon an ambulance. Next she started to punch her brother’s number before remembering that he was not yet back from unspecified business in the UK. After a moment’s pause for thought she tapped out the private number of her uncle the Amir.

***

Felix had been to check the VIP passenger in First Class. Shaikh Ibrahim, who was not one of Felix’s ‘clients’, slept with a beatific expression on his face and a hefty erection lifting the front of his robe like a tailor’s hand. The chief steward drooled.

Tariq Bahzoomi (who did avail himself of Felix’s services between regular girlfriends) was also sleeping, both hands over his crotch as if to soothe or protect it. The chief steward did not drool over Tariq. Felix liked his trade lean and mean, not dumpy and grumpy.

He returned to Business Class. A dazzling redhead in her early twenties and a brassy-looking thirty-plus blonde had commandeered the rear port-side seats. These were two of the dozen or so stewardesses who ‘moonlighted’ for Felix.

The redhead’s name was Melissa, her background Surrey’s stockbroker belt. The blonde, a Cockney by birth and christened Debbie, called herself Dawn, the name she’d coined for her last job on the fourth floor of a tenement in King’s Cross. Unlike the majority of her Belaj Air colleagues, Dawn had had to tart herself down rather than up.

Felix perched on the arm of the aisle seat in front of them and leaned over its back. Dawn took advantage of their first break since Heathrow to report on last night’s business (Felix ran an international operation).

‘That Saudi prince at the ’yde Park ’ilton was a bit of a tosser,’ she grumbled. Belaj Air grooming had done nothing for the dropped aitches and glottal stops of Stepney Green. ‘He only give me a ’undred quid. I ’ad to ’elp me-self to another two ’undred off ’is wallet when ’e went to the toilet. D’you want your ’alf now?’

‘Later will do,’ said Felix. He opened his Filofax. ‘You know you’re doing Issa Bahzoomi this afternoon – at the Bonk-house?’ The Bonk-house was Bahzoomi Mansions, a block of service apartments owned by Tariq’s father which the men of the family, other wealthy locals and visitors from the mainland used for assignnations with Felix’s girls and those who worked for Mrs Fadilah.

Dawn made a face. ‘I ’ate Issa. ‘He’s an old fart.’ She laughed. ‘He’s old and ’e farts.’

‘Never mind his wind,’ said Felix; ‘you’ve done it in worse weather in fish-shop doorways!’ He enjoyed reminding Dawn of her previous life, but it was a fact that none of his girls expected to be paid less than £250 for services which only two years ago Dawn had rendered for as little as £35 a time.

He took another look at his Filofax. ‘Tonight you’re seeing -’ he lowered his voice – ‘Shaikh Nasser, at the beach palace. His driver will pick you up at eight-thirty.’

One of Felix’s best customers, Shaikh Nasser was Minister of the Interior, the Amir’s second son and his heir in the event of any misfortune befalling the enormously fat Crown Prince who was at some risk of succumbing to over-indulgence or sheer inertia.

‘Nasser’s a bit of all right,’ said Dawn. ‘He’s promised me a Mercedes next month.’

‘Has he now,’ Felix said thoughtfully. He preferred his girls to receive only cash, from which his percentage was easier to extract. He turned to Melissa. ‘You’re doing Shaikh Mubarak from the National Bank. At the Bonk-house. You can borrow Tallulah.’ Tallulah was Felix’s Toyota.

‘Shaikh Mubarak’s nice,’ said Melissa. ‘Tubby and cuddly. A bit like you, dah-ling. Perhaps even cuddlier.’ Elocution lessons in her teens had given Melissa a cut-glass Belgravia accent which was disconcerting to airline passengers and sometimes put her other clients completely off their stroke.

Felix acknowledged her teasing with an indulgent smile. Noting an entry in his Filofax, his eyes narrowed. ‘Don’t forget he still owes us for last time.’

‘Dahling, you know I’m hopeless on the money side. You remind him.’

‘Put ’im over to me,’ Dawn volunteered. ‘Nobody shags me on tick. Strictly cash up front, that’s me.’

‘And for a little bit extra, up the back too!’ As had Sam earlier, Felix cackled at his own crude humour. Dawn grinned cheerfully, ever tolerant of jokes at her expense. Melissa, to whom sodomy in the line of duty was no laughing matter, smiled bleakly.

***

Like the previous conversation on the starboard side, this one was being monitored from the first row of Economy. Not by Cass McBride who had finally dozed off, but by her only neighbour, a slim dark-haired young man whose name was Eddy Lawrence.

When the movie began he’d moved to a vacant seat two rows back for a better view of the screen. Stringent Arab censorship had shorn the film, an American adult thriller, of sense as well as sensation. After fifteen minutes Eddy gave up and returned to his port-side window seat in the front row and tried to sleep, stretching his legs over the floor space of the empty seat next to him. A mixture of excitement and apprehension overcame his tiredness.

Like Cass McBride, Eddy felt he was running away to the Persian Gulf, although this was to over-dramatise his one-year secondment to the National Bank of Belaj. Eddy, who was nursing a broken heart, hoped he was not so much running from something as to something: some great new love or, failing that, a great adventure.

And now he listened, spellbound, to the conversation from behind the partition. All three had distinctive voices that easily carried over the engine noise, which had drowned the previous conversation involving the platinum-haired stewardess with the amazing boobs and the pikestaff-plain one who’d served Eddy his dinner.

Before take-off Eddy had been given what he recognised as the ‘once-over’ by the chief steward as he made a head-count of passengers. Eavesdropping now on the chief steward’s briefing/debriefing of the glamorous redhead and the tarty blonde, Eddy almost hugged himself with glee. Two pickpocketing part-time hookers and their gay pimp! Only halfway to Belaj and already things were looking up.

In his first letter to his widowed mother, who’d taught generations of dusty piccaninnies to sing ‘I’m H-A-P-P-Y’ and ‘Jesus Wants Me For A Sunbeam’, Eddy looked forward to informing her – with a degree of relish – that he had, barely three hours into his year of exile, fallen among thieves and harlots.

***

Eddy was not going to be disappointed. On the island of Belaj he – and Cass McBride, who in truth was neither Cass nor McBride – would find love and adventure. And Eddy was to contribute, in a small way and entirely unintentionally, to the downfall of Shaikh Khalid bin Khalifa al-Khazi, Amir and Prime Minister of Belaj.

***

‘This man must be found, and he must be found quickly.’

‘Does Your Highness have a descrip-’

‘It is possible he has a motorcycle. My niece’s maid heard a motorcycle. Or this may be irrelevant. He may have a car, a bicycle or only his feet. He may have accomplices. In any case I want you to check all motorcyclist records.’

‘Your Highness can count on my depart-’

‘And I want men on every roundabout and at every major intersection before sunrise.’

‘But, Highness, such a drain on manpow-’

‘Liaise with my sons. I have already spoken to them. They are putting the armed forces on full alert. Use every man you’ve got. Cancel all leave. No days off. No sick leave for anyone who can walk.’

‘But, Highness, I would need the authority of your Highness’s nephew to take such dras-’

‘You have my authority,’ the Amir lowered his voice to its coldest tone, sending shivers up the spine of the man at the other end of the line, an immigrant Palestinian who’d risen through the ranks of the Traffic Police to become Shaikh Ibrahim bin Sayed’s senior assistant. ‘Is that not good enough for you?’ the Amir added icily.

‘I beg Your Highness’s pardon if I gave the impress-’

‘I’m told that Ibrahim bin Sayed is on tonight’s flight from London. Send someone to meet him.’

‘I shall go myself to meet Your Highness’s most illustrious nephew.’ The Palestinian managed to complete a sentence for the first time. The Amir would have liked to tell him to cut the grovelling, but the endless grovelling kept everyone aware of the pecking order.

Shaikh Khalid bin Khalifa al-Khazi was the absolute (and, he would admit, absolutely feudal) ruler of this tiny emirate perched on the rim of the Gulf’s third largest oil field. The Commandant of Traffic Police was his favourite and most trusted nephew. Had Ibrahim been in Belaj the Amir would have called him even before speaking to his own sons. Ibrahim’s staff would be crucial in investigating the murder of ‘the Crawler’, as the late Farouk Bahzoomi had been widely known. Traffic cops in Belaj had powers far beyond the enforcing of speed limits and breathalyser tests.

‘Tell your men to report anything suspicious,’ the Amir said now. ‘Do not tell them about the death of the Crawler. We don’t want to make people nervous. Officially he will have died of natural causes. Political murders do not happen in my country.’

‘Perhaps it was not a political murder, Highness,’ the Palestinian ventured.

‘What else could it be?’

‘I don’t know, Highness. A sex-crime?’

‘The Crawler was married to my niece.’ A yet more dangerous edge entered the Amir’s voice. ‘You think my niece has a lover and he killed her husband?’

‘M-maybe there was a m-m-mistress.’ the Palestinian stammered nervously. The Amir responded with a short barking laugh.

‘The Crawler got his sex at the house of Mrs Fadilah. You think Mrs Fadilah would assassinate one of her best customers?’

‘I don’t know what to think, Highness,’ the other man confessed.

A sneer entered the Amir’s voice as he said, ‘The Crawler died because he was the Crawler. This is the work of those subversives who want my country to be ruled, like Iran, by mullahs or, like Turkey and the USA, by the democratic vote of the people. We must find these subversives quickly. I want their guts for garters.’

Shaikh Khalid bin Khalifa al-Khazi did not say ‘I want their guts for garters’. What he said in Arabic is impossible – and too terrible – to translate into English. At the other end of the line his nephew’s assistant shivered in his warm bed beside his snoring wife.
************************************************************************************************

From Chapter Seven: Sodom and Gomorrah

[Eddy Lawrence’s job is to induct the staff of the Belaj National Bank – including A.Q. Qamber, his landlord’s son - into the wonders of computerization. The Personnel Manager Ahmed Jabri has been bringing women – including Farouk’s widow Nayla – to Eddy’s flat for sex sessions. Sadie is a puppy salvaged from a nearby plantation.]

Ali Qassim Qamber failed to turn up for his 9 o’clock lesson on Tuesday morning. The other pupils reported that just after the bank opened at 7.30 three members of the security police had invaded the premises and taken him away.
Giving the rest of the class some practice exercises Eddy rushed up to the Personnel Office, to be told by a disconcertingly calm Ahmed that the bank was helpless in this situation: ‘We must not rock the ship,’ he said.

Ahmed was out of his office for the rest of the morning but he phoned Eddy at home after lunch to check that the coast was clear for another visit. Eddy started to ask about A.Q. but Ahmed cut him off, saying it was unwise to discuss these things on the telephone.

When he came to the flat he again left his companion on the doormat while he organised Eddy’s – and Sadie’s – withdrawal to the lounge. He promised to come back later for a talk. Sadie yapped at the clatter of heels down the hall, which only accelerated the clattering heels and the closing of the bedroom door.

At the height of today’s proceedings Ahmed’s partner produced sounds reminiscent of a yodelling Swiss maid. Barks and scratchings at the lounge door accompanied the subsequent ablutions in the bathroom and clattering departure. Ahmed returned after half-an-hour and they sat in the lounge drinking lager. Wary of handling a dog Ahmed prodded Sadie with a shoe.

‘This girl of yours is very loud,’ Eddy observed.

Ahmed shrugged. ‘Oh, you know, these virgins …’

‘Virgins! I thought you would be bringing gahbas.’ (Prostitutes.)

‘Gahbat,’ he corrected Eddy’s plural. ‘Some of them are gahbat, some are virgins.’ He smoothed a crease in his dishdasha.

‘But if a Muslim girl loses her virginity, won’t she be disgraced and no one will marry her?’

‘They don’t lose their virginity,’ Ahmed said.

‘But -’

‘When they are virgins or when it is a certain time of the month I use the -’ he looked away in embarrassment -’ you know, the back gate.’

‘Well, bugger me,’ Eddy said, not, he immediately realised, the most sensitive observation under the circumstances.

‘No wonder they make so much noise.’

‘This noise is for my pleasure, not because I am hurting them.’ He pushed Sadie away with a harder-than-necessary kick but undiscouraged she scampered back for more. Eddy dragged her off Ahmed’s feet and gave her a ball of paper to chase and destroy.

He asked about A.Q. Qamber. Ahmed had made some discreet enquiries. Ali Qassim’s next-oldest brother was a suspect in last month’s murder of the newspaper editor. Though not himself ‘political’, according to Ahmed, A.Q. was known to be close to this brother, who had fled by dhow to Iran.

‘Ali will be back at work next week,’ Ahmed predicted. ‘Maybe he will not be able to count money for a few weeks. I think you will see he is losing some fingernails.’ He laughed grimly.

‘They don’t do that sort of thing, do they?’ Eddy naïvely asked, aghast.

‘Worse than this. We call the Security Police Headquarters “the Fingernail Factory”.’

‘Where is it?’

‘That big white building opposite the Mumtaz Cinema.’

Eddy shuddered to think of cheeky young A.Q. being separated from his fingernails. ‘But perhaps he doesn’t know anything about his brother or this chap’s murder.’ Eddy was still being naïve.

‘Well,’ said Ahmed, ‘torturing him they will find out for sure.’

‘It’s barbaric. They don’t torture people in my country.’

‘This happens in every country. Even in your precious Queen Elizabeth’s England. Sometimes torture. Sometimes with drugs.’

‘Oh well, maybe with drugs,’ Eddy conceded. ‘But when people find out about that sort of thing in England, there’s a big outcry.’

‘Here, if you cry out they will send you to Ahmar Island.’

‘But if too many people make a fuss, they can’t put them all on the Island.’

‘Maybe they can. Or they will put the leaders in the sea for the sharks to eat.’ There was now a tremor in his voice. ‘This will make the others be quiet.’

‘You’re an intelligent man, Ahmed. I can’t believe you just accept things like this and don’t do something about it.’

‘What can I do? Make a revolution, like in Iran?’

‘Well – yes. Why not?’

‘You think in Iran is better now with these crazy mullahs?’ In his agitation he was losing control of his syntax. ‘You know nothing about these things.’

‘I know it’s not right to let the fucking secret police torture an innocent boy,’ Eddy shouted. ‘Is this justice in Belaj?’
Ahmed was silent: either he was exasperated or this was justice in Belaj.

[Thus the seeds of the Gulf’s first revolution are sown. You can read about the real-life Disappearance in Bahrain which gave David Gee the idea for this element in the novel on the Shaikh-Down Blog - www.shaikh-down.blogspot.com]

David Gee, The Author

Originally earmarked for the Methodist Mission Field, David Gee found that ‘the missionary position’ didn’t suit him. A career in teaching took him to the Middle East where he moonlighted as a journalist and socialized heavily with the ‘natives’ and with stewardesses from one of the local airlines, which came in handy when he started writing SHAIKH-DOWN.

He now lives in SE England with Sadie and Sophie (who appear in the novel), two mongrels salvaged from a date plantation in Bahrain.

“Witty, entertaining, raunchy and very well written.” Peter O’Donnell, creator of Modesty Blaise

“Ribald and politically incorrect. Set in a fictitious but absolutely believable Arab state where sheikhs and their minions are locked in a life-and-death struggle to survive the relentless move towards democracy. Entertaining.”

GAY TIMES

“Probably a Zionist plot masterminded by the CIA to undermine the good image of morally irreproachable Gulf Arabs.”

GULF TIMES

On the Persian Gulf island of Belaj Egyptian belly-dancers and British flight attendants are working overtime to relieve some of the wealthier citizens of their frustrations – and their petro-dollars.

One of the punters is murdered: whisky-soaked publisher Farouk whose nymphomaniac wife Nayla is a niece of the local despot, His Highness Shaikh Khalid bin Khalifa al-Khazi. Farouk’s murder is the first ‘rumble’ of an earthquake that will shake Belaj (and all Arabia) to its foundations.

Newcomer Cass, an East London housewife, becomes a $500 hooker. Pneumatic American stewardess Sammy-Jo and bisexual British banker Eddy are drawn into a plot by BARF (the Belaj Armed Revolutionary Front) to assassinate the Amir in a steamy bedroom romp.

But what happens after the coup, as the Arab World gets its first female President? Will it be the Dawn of Democracy – or “Whoops, Apocalypse”?

And how does the New World Order come to install Ann Widdecombe in 10 Downing Street?

***********************************************************************************************

Hit the links, above, to read Extracts from the book and to find out what Ms Widdecombe had to say about inheriting the keys to 10 Downing Street. There’s another comic Extract on the Shaikh-Down Blog, where you can also read about a Disappearance in Bahrain when David Gee was working there, an event which, in the novel, triggers a cataclysm.