Against All Odds

by R. A. Lang

  After several days driving around Riyadh looking for the right souk to go shopping in for things to make home more comfortable before my wife arrived, my stress levels were finally beginning to subside and dropped down from a state of outright panic down to high anxiety.

  After buying plastic containers and garbage bins, grape juice and alcohol free beer, my wine and beer making was soon underway and going down very nicely with my expatriate colleagues living in the same compound. I’d built up enough of a stock in time for when our wives arrived to join us. Once they had all arrived, I invited all to a barbecue on the first free Friday when we’d all be off work for the day.

  Everything seemed to be going okay until the father of the Indian family, living on the same compound, reported me to the head office in Riyadh for making alcohol.

  He had never heard nor seen any evidence, but the wife of a fellow British expat from Wick in Scotland had deliberately told his Indian wife who had naturally told her Indian husband, who had in turn, naturally told my head office. It was all very natural I thought. Not!

  Previously, neither my colleagues nor I continued to speak to the Indian husband after he had sold his fifteen year old daughter to a seventy-five year old Saudi for the marriage dowry. He knew the man because they went to the same mosque together.

  I was instructed to go to the head office and accept the consequences from our administrative and human resources managers. I had no idea what was happening at the time, and I was actually slightly excited that I was being transferred to Jeddah. The penalty for making alcohol in those days was to be placed in a Saudi jail for twelve months and given sixty lashes with a cat of nine tails spread out during the course of the sentence.

  Anyway, those Saudis were rather polite about the whole thing and I was let off with a strict cautionary warning and told to empty any bottles I still had. That was some party. I invited a few of my trusted expats, mainly Swedish and German to help me do just that. What they didn’t consume, they took home with them just in case I was inspected.

  The Scottish wife who had caused all the betrayal didn’t stop at that. She’d have her son climb up the spiral staircase outside my villa and spend sessions on our flat roof spying on our every move and report back. We couldn’t even have friends visit without her knowing. With hand-written messages written in the dust on our gate and ugly images of gargoyles it was time to look for a new place to live.

  I applied to be moved to an apartment situated at the other end of Olaya Street, which passed all the way through the centre of Riyadh, not far from my original hotel. Many of my Norwegian, Finish and Swedish friends lived there and there were barbeque areas, tennis courts and a swimming pool so it seemed to be an improvement to where we were staying and what we were living amongst.

  One Friday morning, shortly before moving to the apartment, I began to feel soreness at the back of my throat. We had been invited to a barbecue that evening across the small pool in one of the other villas, so I was hoping that all I needed to do was gargle with strong salt water to stop it from getting worse.

  The salt water did nothing, and I became more ill as the day went on. My wife refused to listen to me complaining about the increasing discomfort in my throat as her only thought was about the barbecue and which bachelors she hoped she would meet there. She was the flirtatious type and always chose to ignore me when in the company of the other European nationalities.

  Later in the afternoon, my throat became so bad that I couldn’t speak and even my breathing became restricted. Eventually, I collapsed. I tried to get up, but I didn’t have the strength to move. The more I tried, the weaker I seemed to get and I was fading fast.

  My wife, complaining bitterly, went across the compound to call a British nurse working in the city and she dropped everything she was doing and came rushing over to see what was wrong with me. Within seconds of checking me out, she went running as fast as she could to ask her husband to bring his car around to our outside entrance to rush me into hospital.

  I was fading more and more by the minute and I could no longer say anything at all. Her husband came rushing up the stairs to help carry me to his car while my wife just stood there, helpless. While her husband was busy bringing his car around, the nurse had called the hospital to give them advanced notice and instructions to be waiting at the side of the road with a wheelchair and an intravenous drip.

  It was a short ten minute drive to the Saudi hospital and sure enough, when we arrived at the side of the road outside the hospital, a Filipino nurse was waiting as instructed. It was quite a struggle trying to get me out of the car and into the wheelchair. I felt totally useless as my friends did everything they possibly could to waste no time in helping me into the wheelchair.

  I was in a terrible state by then. The Filipino nurse was desperately trying to get an intravenous needle into the back of my left hand under the bad lighting from the street lights and she kept missing my veins. Soon the nurse took charge and inserted the needle into my arm in seconds. After that, she taped it securely and wheeled me into the casualty’s reception.

  An Indian doctor soon came in to examine me and using an instrument, he looked down my throat and wasted no time in prescribing me a strong cocktail of antibiotics and a private room for the next few nights.

  Saudi Arabia can proudly boast that they have some of the very best medical facilities in the world, and everything looked immaculate as I was moved to my room. The nurse appeared a short time later to check the settings on my automatic drip.

  She made a slight adjustment and told me that the machine was the very latest available. My friends asked my wife whether she’d return later because they needed to go as the car was still at the side of the road, but much to their surprise, she said she’d return with them because the barbecue was about to start.

  Early the following morning, the very same doctor came to see how I was doing. He told me that I was a lucky man. He had diagnosed me with ulcerated tonsillitis and explained that the ulcers had become septic and managed to poison my bloodstream and that I had septicaemia. I asked him if all that could possibly happen in less than twelve hours to which he smiled and replied, “It did with you.”

  My wife visited me that evening after missing the daytime visiting hour due to a shopping trip to see how I was doing. She arrived late, so she could only stay with me for twenty minutes. She didn’t seem to think it was necessary to visit me because I had nurses to take care of me. Nevertheless, people kept asking her how I was doing, so she didn’t have any choice but to visit.

  I was able to speak a little by the time she arrived because the antibiotics had started working. I asked her to leave some money in the drawer next to my bed so I could buy a newspaper to read. She told me I didn’t need any money whilst staying in hospital because I had a TV. She coldly left without giving me anything.

  I spent five nights in the hospital before being cleared and discharged to return home. Those five glorious nights in the peace and quiet of the hospital enabled me to finally get some restful sleep. Several weeks of living on the compound did not afford such luxuries.

  Outside our compound, workers had dug a long trench right along our street. In the daytime, I couldn’t get any sleep from working my nightshift because lorries were using the spare ground next to our compound a few metres from my villa as a dumping ground. Every time they dumped a load of earth, the tailgate of the lorries would slam shut, which made any sleep impossible.

  At night, an ancient diesel generator with no silencer was started up to power a long string of electric light bulbs along the length of the trench. The noise made our entire villa shake, causing things to fall off the shelves. Several times a night I would sneak over to the generator and pour sugar into its fuel tank and run back inside my villa. After a further ten minutes the generator would shut down affording me an hour or two of sleep before they managed to restart it again.

  Driving to and from work was becoming more and more dangerous as I fough
t to stay awake. One time, I actually fell asleep at the office while standing. It must have only been for a split second and I fell to the floor when I woke up. I really missed the hospital.

  There was always something going on and one night, while working out in the desert on nightshift duty, something occurred that would have made it to the newspapers if the project hadn’t been classed as top secret. It was one o’clock in the morning and time to drive up from our underground workplace to head to the site canteen. As I neared the area, I found workers everywhere, all looking up into the clear, starlit sky.

  I pulled over and asked one of the security officers what was going on. He said that someone had visited the site with three very bright lights that had lit up the ground below it, brighter than daylight could ever have.

  I could feel the tension and excitement in the air and once in the canteen, it was clear that everyone was very excited and talking about the same subject. I joined a table full of Filipinos to try to find out more, but everyone had the same story to tell.

  After I finished eating, I drove over to my Pakistani security friend to see if he knew anything more. He told me the same as everyone else had and that something had hovered over the site with three super high-powered spotlights. The airspace above the site was a restricted area, so no civilian aircrafts were permitted to fly anywhere near the exclusion zone.

  While the object was still hovering silently of the area of interest, the site security had called Riyadh to explain what it was they were looking at. They were told that there wasn’t anything showing up in that area according to their Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS). The Saudi Ministry of Defence always kept their aircraft fitted with AWACS flying around the capital twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

  The security stressed that everyone had stopped work on the site and all could see the huge object hovering low above them, so they couldn’t be wrong. The air defence agreed to send two jets to fly directly over the site coordinates to get a visual of what everyone was claiming to be there. Cameras were prohibited on the site to help maintain its secrecy, so recording the event was impossible.

  My friend continued to tell the story with increasing excitement. Evidently, he had returned outside to wait for the jets to fly by with his colleagues, telling them what was about to happen. The object continued to hover silently over the very same area for a few more minutes before it slowly began to move.

  Suddenly, it shot off at an incredible speed and disappeared into the night skies just a couple of seconds before two Saudi air force jets flew past at very low altitude, over the exact area the object had been followed by the deafening roar from their engines.

  Apparently, the jets hadn’t picked up anything on their radars either, but three thousand workers couldn’t possibly be wrong.

  There was always something happening out in the desert: if not a thunderstorm, a sand storm. One night, accompanied by a colleague, I drove back above ground because we heard there was a thunderstorm from hell going on. As I approached the entrance of the tunnel from one hundred metres below ground, I was met by a most beautiful array of lightning, which fanned out like fire coral.

  Excited by our first sight, we drove to the highest point we could, which was on a small hilltop to get a better view. Once I’d parked our jeep we took in the most spectacular free light show we’d ever seen. While we sat there amazed with such a spectacle, we noticed that one particular streak of lightning was repeatedly hitting the ground and heading directly towards us while other streaks continued all over the place. We waited for a few moments until we realised that the lightning really was heading in our direction and decided it wasn’t such a good choice of parking spots. We were on the highest part of the site and surrounded by metal!

  Without hanging around a moment longer we quickly drove off back down the track we’d just come up. We had only moved a few yards when an intense streak of blinding light drilled the very ground on which we’d been parked. It was a sad fact that cameras weren’t allowed anywhere near the site, so it wasn’t possible to take any shots of the display, but it was an amazing show to have experienced and one that I’ll never forget for the rest of my life.

  Whilst working another nightshift, but this time taking my turn above ground, I was walking back towards my little site office when the wind seemed to pick up dramatically. In just a few minutes, it had changed from a pleasurable gentle evening breeze into the strongest wind I’ve ever experienced.

  It was the beginning of a tremendous sand storm of enormous proportions, which had come from nowhere. As hard as I tried, I could barely make it across the open yard towards my above ground office. The office was a portable cabin and certainly not a good choice to seek refuge, but by that time there wasn’t anywhere else closer to seek shelter.

  Running wasn’t possible as I would have been blown over and I was practically walking horizontally as I made my way across the yard. By the time I reached back to my office, my toes were digging hard into the dust for grip while my hands were just inches off the ground while I was being held up by the storm’s force.

  Once inside the office, it was clear that the office wasn’t the best place to seek refuge as the entire portable cabin was lifting off the ground and at times close to rolling over. The side of the office, which was being lifted by the storm, held all the bookshelves with our construction records. Needless to say, by the time I arrived, all the files were already all over the floor.

  Fortunately, the landline was still attached so I called my colleagues based underground for that week and told them to stay where they were as it was almost one o’clock in the morning and time for them to head up to the canteen. I remember looking up into the sky to see an empty fifty-gallon oil drum flying across the yard about a hundred feet above the ground. I would never have believed such storms existed if it hadn’t have been for that night.

  Driving back to Riyadh the next morning, I noticed that a huge, concealed door, just fifty metres from the road, had been exposed by the sandstorm near our workplace. It was close by, but still a few hundred yards outside the perimeter fence. When I returned to work that night, it had been quickly covered up again. There were many rumours that some of the underground tunnels led off to other underground locations, so I could only assume that what I saw was one of them.

  Soon, Ramadan came along, which I was very grateful for. Because my wife never cooked for me, I always arrived at nightshift hungry, waiting for the canteen to open. Fortunately for me, all our site security guards were from Pakistan, and they prepared special food for themselves during Ramadan. I arrived on site at six o’clock in the evening, just in time to be invited to sit with them on the ground and share their food.

  They always prepared extra so they could invite friends to join them, however, they were repaid throughout the year. We constantly supplied them with soft drinks that were freely available in the office kitchen, but otherwise inaccessible to them at their posts. Ramadan was their way of saying thank you.

  After eighteen months in Riyadh, I heard I was officially being transferred to Jeddah where everyone wanted to go. Being transferred to Jeddah was a good move. It meant I no longer had to see the faces of those who’d revelled in stabbing me in the back time and time again. As I was the only one who voluntarily took on the burden of setting up all the Riyadh site’s documentation system and quality records, my company wanted me to do the very same for their site in Jeddah, so all my work had paid off quite nicely.

  Jeddah was like a different world compared to the everyday stresses an expat endured living in Riyadh. I knew quite a lot of the contractor’s staff as they’d also been transferred from Riyadh. They told me they had their own private beach not far out of the city and that as I was their client, my car pass automatically gave me permission to use it.

  My wife and I used it several times and it was like a little piece of Europe. Friday was always the rest day for everyone so we’d always use the opportunity to enjoy the p
rivacy of the beach. They had even built a pier so people didn’t need to risk walking over the coral to the drop-off and instead, could simply walk down it and use the steps to enter the Red Sea. Walking over the coral was quite dangerous as it was infested with extremely venomous stonefish, which have spines all down their dorsal fins. If anyone were unlucky enough to step on one of them, their screams would be heard from far away and they’d spend the next six months in hospital having skin grafts until the venom finally wore off.

  After just a few weeks enjoying life in Jeddah and still trying to find my way around, my wife insisted on going on holiday on her own instead of waiting just another two months to go with me on my annual leave. As it transpired, she had secretly planned with her mother and aunt to go to Benidorm in Spain and that’s exactly what she did rather than stay in the United Kingdom, as she’d told me.

  It was in her absence that I found out from a Swedish friend that she had been regularly unfaithful whilst I was working shifts in Riyadh once we had moved to the apartment where all the other Europeans lived. I could only assume that it was the reason for her coldness when I’d arrive home from work so many times.

  I called her at her mother’s home number to ask how she was, but instead of reaching her mother, however, her brother answered the phone. He didn’t realise that I didn’t know anything about her going to Benidorm with her mother and aunt and spilt the beans.

  Thus began divorce number one after just nineteen months of marital bliss.

  Once I had learnt what my wife was getting up to while I was at work, I paid my Saudi site manager a visit. He was a prince, and his family were very powerful in Jeddah and they owned a large amount of the land. He was a very good man and keen fisherman, and we would often talk about our escapades fishing in the Red Sea. I’d go to his office regularly to show him photos of my latest catches, which he always appreciated, and offer him some of my fresh catch to take home.