Story: Captive Guest MkII

Hi! Here's a story I wrote in June. It started as an entry for the Polar Expressions book, Inkblots, and was published recently along with over 200 other short stories (and I mean short - the word limit was 750, so that's seriously compressed narrative). Here I've edited and filled it out a bit.

And yes, it's based loosely on real life - the place, vegetation and culture is authentic, and we have met a Yemeni man who went through this experience. My wife and I hiked along that trail - it's an amzing place. But I threw the maple leaf in there for free.

PS I'm working on another SF short, but it insists it wants to be a novella! Watch this space for an update on that.

The Captive Guest

A Fictionalised Tale of Travel on a real Middle-Eastern Island

Mohamed drove me out of Hadibo and along the coast. My breakfast of fried beans and hot, black, sweet tea lay heavily in my stomach, stirred by the hum and shake of the wheels on the road. The sun came pouring over the Hagahir mountains behind us and over the wide coastal plain. Over to one side, children splashed in a small lagoon by the beach. Short green bushes and grasses had sprung up everywhere after the winter rain, looking as if they'd been airdropped onto the dusty earth.

We came to the Dixam junction and turned away from the sea towards the mountains. He was a good driver, steady and careful. I realised that I knew nothing about Mohamed – whether he was married, where he lived, nothing. The old Landcruiser trembled under us like the steering was loose. Actually it was. That I knew.

Up on the plateau I asked Mohamed to stop the car. I grabbed my camera and walked over and looked up at an umbrella tree: crowded, pale, fingery branches, supporting on fingertips a spreading canopy of thin blades like huge pine needles. The peaks rose ahead, sharp against the morning sky. I couldn't see Ibrahim's mountain yet.

Then we drove on.

Hiking up a moorland valley, alone among heather-like bushes, I followed a faint trail that kept fading out among the boulders and tree roots, only to pop up further ahead among the heather-like bushes. It all reminded me of hikes in the Scottish Highlands. I passed a bottle tree: an obese, grey, alien turnip sprouting eye-stalks ending in tiny pink flowers.

I hadn't learned much Socotran. "Al gurk?" I tried.

"Al gu'uk," he replied delightedly. Peering at my face, he switched to fluent Arabic that I barely followed. He was about my age. His face was lined by laughter or hardship, or both. Much about me seemed to puzzle him. "Where is your companion?" he asked in astonishment. I shrugged and tried to smile. Brian was catching up on his pre-intermediate course marking and Jenny said she preferred gardening to hiking when she wasn't visiting the female students from her classes. Such is the life of an English teacher overseas.

I told him where I was going. From what he said, it appeared I was lost. I looked up and down the cunningly curved valley. Yep.

"Come, have lunch at my house. I'll show you your way," he said. I wanted to refuse. I'd been trapped in people's homes in the Middle East too often, a victim of their legendary hospitality. And there were those long silences. A Socotran islander is as conversant with hockey as I am with goat husbandry.

Saleh Salem lived with his family in a stone hut resting on a bare hilltop. There were great views out there, but I found myself sitting cross-legged and shoeless on a thin mattress in a room with only a small window. It felt barely habitable with old lino and mats around the edges. A leather bag and clothes hung on rough wooden pegs. Raw logs and twigs made up the ceiling. The dark room was awash with odours: stale goat, open drains, cooking smoke. As the house, so the man, I thought. I waited, fidgeting. How could I let Ibrahim know that I wouldn't get there today?

Saleh's children peeped around the door with shy grins. A whole family of goats poked their inquisitive nostrils into the room. Then Saleh shooed them all away as he came in with a small bowl of goat meat broth. As we took turns sipping, I told him about my promise to my student. "Mish mushkila", he said: no problem. I sighed, and fingered the outside of my thigh pocket. I could feel the rustling of the plastic bag wrapped around the small Arabic New Testament I intended for Ibrahim.

So I ate quickly, then tried to excuse myself. But no, the main goat course hadn't arrived yet: a large plate of rice and a heap of goat bones and chunks of various organs in more broth. When I refused the treasured eyeball he hid his disappointment well. After that, endless small cups of black tea.

Finally I thanked him decisively and lurched onto stiff legs. At the door I glanced down for my shoes and noticed a thumb-nail of dull metal in the packed dirt. I unearthed it and rubbed it between fingertips to reveal a leaf on one side. "A Canadian penny!" I exclaimed. "How did you get this?"

"From Canada," he replied with a sharp smile, and he told his tale.

He'd travelled off the island as a youth, to work in Montreal with an uncle who had leapfrogged there from Abu Dhabi. So Saleh worked for a few weeks in a supermarket.

I couldn't much understand what followed, but he'd been travelling south of the border when those planes hit the twin towers. At the border he was stopped and questioned. He'd ended up in detention for eight months, treated as an illegal alien and assumed a terrorist, speaking no English and very little French. His ordeal sounded harrowing, and he'd ended up back on Socotra with little more than that one cent to show for his travels.

"Sorry," I said, then regretted how hollow it sounded.

"Mish mushkila. Government bad, people good," he replied, good-naturedly.

Finally I got out of the door, wordless, empty. I needed to give him some gift, something that might make up for the way he had been treated, and nothing I had would do. I thought of trying to tell him about Jesus. That was the point of contact with this man! Jesus was falsely accused, beaten, rejected by the people he came to live among. It was what he needed to hear. But was I the one to tell him? I looked into his face and hesitated.

In the end he pressed into my hand a small disc of coppery metal. As coarse as bark, his fingertips were warm, and anything but alien. Then he showed me a path and I said thank you again, and goodbye. That meant I might not see him again, ever. I saw the lines around his eyes: most likely etched from facing troubles that would likely crush me, but he had no one there to lift up his head again. But what did I know of his life? Impulsively, I wrenched the book out of my pocket and gave it to him, saying it was a precious gift.

He smiled in delight, and took it from the black plastic bag. He turned it over in his hands, opened it, gazed inside, turned a page, then closed it and gave it back. "Sorry, I don't read too well," he mumbled.

Again, I was at a loss for words. He started talking about the route I should take. I nodded, and said I would see him again soon, In sha'Allah - God willing. I meant it.

Somehow the sun was still high. I waved to him from the next hilltop and smiled to myself. I heard him call, "Au revoir."