by Nick Louth
‘Cantara, it’s just a document.’
‘But Bram,’ Cantara squealed, ‘you said you could get me a British passport. This isn’t right. This isn’t ME!’
‘We will eventually be able to get you one,’ Bram said coolly. ‘We have lawyers who know their way around the system. But it will take a year or so. It isn’t easy. The British immigration system is one of the toughest ones in the world. Look. We’ve taken you in, you have a subsidised room. We viewed helping you as a charitable duty. Now we’re spending a lot of money on you. Please don’t be ungrateful.’
Cantara said nothing for a moment. She realised that yet again she was spurning the good intentions of others. First, the foundation which paid for her studies, then Chris who had got her a job at the BBC, and now this sacred Zakat duty, part of the holy Koran’s charitable teachings. Her guilt closed around her throat like a vice, but her doubts were not quelled. There was only one thing she could think to say: ‘But she doesn’t even look like me.’
‘Actually, she does,’ Bram insisted. ‘The photos you supplied helped us choose her. It wouldn’t fool your closest friends, agreed, but once we get you the right spectacle frames to match hers, no-one else would know.’
‘Bram. I’m grateful, really. But this seems so wrong.’ That was the word. Something about the whole arrangement just didn’t sit right with her. So much trouble to get her a passport, when she could have just sat here anonymously in the musallah, learning the Koran.
‘Okay Cantara, look. I see your misgivings,’ Bram sighed. ‘Perhaps it’s best if you leave the course. I can ring the UK Border Agency tomorrow, and let them know you’re here. You could be on a plane for Lebanon next week…’
‘No! That’s not what I meant.’ Cantara heard her own voice, shrill and panicky.
‘I know we require a lot of trust,’ Bram said. ‘A lot of faith, from you. We had high hopes. You seemed ready to be devout. But perhaps it isn’t to be.’
‘Bram, it’s just that a false passport…’
‘I know. But it isn’t wrong to break rules when those rules are bad. The border agency regards you as an overstayer. You’ve broken the terms of your student visa, and some very official and threatening letters are probably piling up in your old flat. They really could send you home.’
‘I know,’ Cantara said, staring at the floor. The prospect of going back to Lebanon, to the squalor of Ain al-Hilweh, to the misery of being a refugee was more than she could bear. She hadn’t spoken to her aunt, who had been so kind for so many years, for two months. If she went back she would have to admit to being a failure, having messed up a free western education that had been offered to her on a plate. The shame would live with her forever. No one in Lebanon would ever understand the choices she had made.
As if reading her mind, Bram continued. ‘Your BBC friend wouldn’t be able to help you now, even if he wanted to. His foundation has paid your university fees and you’ve disappeared, leaving them with a big bill.’
‘I hate him, anyway,’ Cantara said, staring wistfully at the passport. There were already some stamps in there, for Thailand, New Zealand, the United States and Australia, all a few years ago. She was curious to know who this Muysaneh Abbas was, who had actually visited these places, and presumably had her passport stolen. There was, she had to admit, a thrill in handling this prized document, proof of British citizenship, for which many people were happy to marry a stranger. It would allow her to come and go to the UK without having to fill in a landing card, and with none of the long queues and searches endured by those with a non-EU document. She was excited but nervous. There was something else to remember. She would be helping an innocent man who had been jailed and abused, and she would be helping her friend Zainab and her beautiful son Harry. Both these thoughts eased her discomfort.
* * *
The day of the flight was nerve-wracking. At the musallah, Cantara had been shown the plastic bag of personal items she was to carry. There were a dozen or so sealed letters, a mobile phone, two framed pictures of Zainab with Harry, and a big crayoned card from the boy, with ‘Daddy I love you!’ written on it in multi-coloured felt-tip. Tears started in Cantara’s eyes as she looked at it. She wanted to help Zainab. She trusted her and liked her, and found herself relaxed and happy whenever she was about. For that reason, she wanted to do something, anything, that could help her. And helping others would she hoped help heal her own wounds that still burned inside her.
Check-in was packed at London Heathrow’s Terminal Three. Cantara had arrived four hours before the flight, to be absolutely sure. But others seemed to have the same idea. Large Arab families with trolley-loads of baggage were waiting even before the desks opened. There were a few Europeans, mostly male businessmen travelling light. Women ranged from over-dressed matrons in leopardskin print, high-heels and dyed blonde hair, right through to the majority, more devout, wearing hijab or niqab. The Arab men, as usual, were all in western clothing from the scruffiest tracksuit right through to sharp suits and jackets.
Cantara herself, at Zainab’s suggestion, had opted for a neutral but conservative appearance: long black trousers, slight heels, grey jacket, a little eye make-up, and a flowered hijab that exactly matched the one in Muysaneh’s passport picture. The glasses, ordered over the Internet, were a perfect match for Muysaneh’s. Still, for all the preparation she felt that people must be looking at her because of the nervousness and guilt she radiated. Here she was, a woman masquerading as a British national, hoping to meet a smuggler who would take banned personal effects and a phone into a high security Middle Eastern jail for someone who may or may not be a terrorist. Apart from the clear bag of items for Jamal, she only had a few clothes, some toiletries and mobile phone. These were all in a zip-up nylon liner that Zainab, who had insisted on checking her packing, had given her. Zainab had also at the last minute, clipped on a little teddy bear luggage tag, explaining that it was from Harry, for good luck.
‘Did you pack the bag yourself?’ asked the check-in woman, as she typed something into her screen. When Cantara hesitated, the woman looked up, blue eyes gazing flatly at her.
‘Yes,’ whispered Cantara.
‘Did anyone give you anything to take with you?’
‘No.’ Cantara felt her face was burning with the lies, and her voice was barely audible. After being shown the rules about liquids, and the list of banned substances, she was given her boarding card and pointed towards security. Like everyone else, she had to take off shoes, and was casually frisked by a woman who never looked at her, but carried on a conversation with a colleague. Just as Bram had promised, there was no passport control on leaving the UK, which was something that surprised her.
The flight was long, crowded and boring. Cantara couldn’t settle to reading a book nor a magazine, and was stuck in the middle row of seats which made it hard to even see from the window. She let the in-flight entertainment wash over her, a mind-numbing distraction. The first feeling of descent into Amman and the lighting of the seatbelt sign brought a renewed wave of anxiety. Bram’s instructions were clear enough. Go to the transit lounge, sit by the Coke machine, or as near as you can get to it. Above all, keep your phone on, except where you are explicitly not allowed to. Put the Puma bag on a seat next to you and wait. This person will arrive, address you by your assumed name and sit on that seat. He will then visit the bathroom with your bag, and reappear to give it back to you. Then go back to the transit check-in desk, and check in for the flight home.
Cantara sat for more than forty minutes waiting in the transit lounge. There seemed to be two soft drinks machines, one at each end of the large and crowded lounge, and she wasn’t sure she was sitting by the correct one. Anxiety pulsed through her. A large family came over to her, and parked huge amounts of baggage around her, while the children ran around, shouting and playing. After ten fidgety minutes she got up and walked to the other machine. No sooner had she sat down then a young clean-shaven man with tinted glasses walked u
p to her.
‘Muysaneh? I’m sorry I’m late.’
She smiled, made room for him to sit down, and then watched as he went off to the bathroom with his holdall and her red bag. He was back within five minutes. It was with huge relief, two hours later, that she boarded the return flight. In her hand, never leaving her sight, was the red Puma bag with its teddy bear luggage tag.
Chapter Twenty-Three
It was four o’clock on a Sunday afternoon when Irfan Tiwana arrived by moped at the Eastern Way Islamic Bookshop just off the Uxbridge Road in West London. With his rotund figure squeezed into a bulky oilcloth motorcycling jacket, flapping shalwar kameez, white socks and sandals he was hard to miss. The imam pushed his aged Honda right to the bookshop window and locked it. He then removed his helmet and rang the doorbell. The door opened and he was let in. The roar of traffic, unrelenting even on the Christian day of worship, carried right through the grimy and tattered shop front, and even into the small meeting room behind.
Rifat and Bram were already there, having approached along a back alleyway and a side-gate into the back yard. Tiwana, always assuming he was under surveillance, took no chances with the identity of associates he wished to keep away from official eyes. The bookshop was one of dozens of Islamic community facilities that the cleric used occasionally, a bewildering array of pastoral, educational and religious visits to confuse surveillance. To the casual viewer, these visits, rarely longer than twenty minutes, were innocent. The cleric arrived with a plastic bag of books, could be seen getting them out and talking to the owner in full view through the window. But contacts, alerted by texts on a network of little-used mobile phones, were met infrequently and at short notice. They were advised to arrive before him, to approach on foot via side roads without CCTV, and to leave at least an hour afterwards.
Rifat was hunched over a laptop in the darkened backroom. The others sat so close to see the screen that Rifat could feel their breath on his sensitive neck. His hands tingled inside the black gloves. They were all transfixed. They were staring at a bright red dot on the GPS tracker that he had loaded onto Cantara’s phone. Real-time longitude and latitude data boxes ticked away, digits racing as the crosshairs moved in line with the dot. The velocity counter showed the phone was moving at 3.4 kph north, north-west. Rifat had superimposed the tracker box over the Google map of Queen Alia airport in Amman, and side-by-side had open a PDF file with an official terminal map, to fill in the details. They had already tracked her through arrivals at Gate 11 and into the Royal Jordanian transit lounge.
‘There,’ said Rifat. ‘She’s put the bag down.’
‘How on earth do you know that?’ Tiwana asked.
Rifat tapped at a readout in the corner of the tracker. ‘GPS altitude has just dropped by 0.7 metres. That matches exactly the baseline figure we’ve seen on the altitude graph.’
A few minutes later the phone began to move. ‘The bag’s in the bathroom,’ Rifat announced. ‘He’ll be switching bags now.’ He had posted an identical Puma sports bag to Yemen a month ago, so that a false bottom could be constructed and the two kilos of PETN inserted as a thin layer between the plastic outer and inner linings. The contact would have this bag inside his own holdall, so Cantara would never see it.
‘I hope she won’t notice the extra weight,’ Tiwana said.
‘She won’t. Remember that the contact is removing all those heavy items that she was bringing in, ostensibly for Jamal. Only her own clothes, shoes and phone will go back. The bag will be lighter.’
He and Bram high-fived, but when Tiwana went to do the same to Rifat, the Saudi wouldn’t raise his hand.
* * *
Cantara’s return flight went without a hitch. It was only after she had landed at Heathrow and approached immigration that her heart started beating hard. She had memorised her story and her supposed address, and kept reminding herself what Bram had said about her resemblance to Muysaneh Abbas. She took a detour into the ladies’ toilet and looked at herself in the mirror. She took out the passport and checked herself against the washed-out image of another woman. Surely, no-one could think they were the same, despite the same clothing, spectacles and supposedly similar nose. Shrugging, she returned to the immigration hall, and followed the sign for British passport holders. As she followed the hurrying knots of weary travellers, she gazed at the huge queues building up for non-EU arrivals. These were the people who looked most like her, and she belonged among them. Instead, walking past to the UK queue, she felt like a privileged celebrity. There were only two people ahead of her at the desk and they seemed to be waved through in seconds.
She walked up to the booth. A male officer smiled at her as she offered him her passport, already open at the picture page. The officer took the passport, and flicked through the pages. He pressed it face-down on something behind his desk.
Looked down.
Looked up and into her face.
Looked down again.
Then he passed her the passport, smiled again and thanked her, in that classic piece of English politeness. She grinned in response, a wave of relief buoying her up as she marched past the booth, through into the green channel of customs and, unchallenged, out into the bustle of arrivals. A man held a card with her bogus first name on it, picked up her bag, and wordlessly drove her in his minicab back to the musallah. Zainab was waiting for her, and hugged her fiercely.
‘Thank you. Thank you so much,’ she said. Zainab and the other female students had cooked a special Lebanese meal for her, and the cookbooks in the kitchen were still open as they gathered around the cramped kitchen table, scooping up the grilled lamb, tabouleh, stewed aubergine and chickpeas.
The big news was that Irfan Tiwana was coming to visit the musallah next week. It was very rare for him to address such small audiences. Cantara was excited. She had never forgotten the evening when she heard him speak, his wisdom, his wit, but above all his magnetism. She had never known anyone so charismatic, who made the hairs stand up on the back of your neck by the things he said.
The week went slowly, and for the first time, Cantara felt irritated by the menial chores she had been asked to do, and her constricted life within the musallah. Having made that trip to Jordan, something which had made her feel important, she felt a seething fervour, but didn’t know what to do with it. It was a power within her breast, as if God himself had a purpose for her. She just didn’t yet know what that destiny was, and that was frustrating. She felt it would probably not be one of quiet diligence within the school, but outside in the wider world. Holding that passport in her hand for the first time had made her feel that. Perhaps Irfan Tiwana could be the intermediary who would reveal it to her.
In the evening, she and dozens of others assembled in the main prayer room to await the cleric’s arrival. The men were at the front, the women towards the back. Among the throng was Rifat. This was the first time she had seen Rifat in several weeks, though they had exchanged some e-mails. She was pleased to see him, and it made her realise how rarely she now set foot outside the musallah except on Bram’s errands. She hadn’t left Acton, she now realised, for more than two months except for the flight.
After exchanging greetings, they sat down cross-legged on the floor at the back to talk and wait. Zainab joined them. They waited, and when the time for the imam’s arrival came and went, the crowd started to get restive. Tiwana finally swept in, twenty-five minutes late, and was greeted with cheers and applause. He clambered onto a dais, grabbed the microphone and immediately began a story. It was the tale of a friend of his, from Lancashire a man called Bob.
‘Now Bob, that’s not his real name, of course, Bob was a middling Muslim. He believed, all right. He went to Friday prayers sometimes, but he drank, and rarely observed the salat. However, Bob got involved with a community group trying to get a mosque built on a derelict piece of land in his town. No, my friends, he wasn’t Bob the Builder. He was an engineer, and offered to help get the place built, and was put in charging
of raising the cash too. Everyone was very pleased to see him involved. In my book, Bob’s alright. He’s starting the long journey to devotion. But then, something happened.’ Tiwana, looked around the audience, with raised eyebrows, indicating the arrival of a mystery. ‘At 3.05am last Tuesday morning armed police used a battering ram to knock down the door of his little terraced house. They didn’t even knock. Officers, many in plain clothes, burst into the bedroom he was sharing with his wife, and pulled him out of bed.’ Tiwana made a violent pulling movement.
‘His two little girls, aged five and seven, started to scream, but neither he nor his wife were allowed to comfort them.’ Tiwana walked around the stage, hands clamped to the side of his head, face held in a rictus of agony. ‘Bob argued, and was then knocked down the stairs. An accident, they said. He was bundled into a van, the house was sealed up and Bob’s wife and children were driven off to relatives, without even being able to pick up a toothbrush or a change of underwear. Bob, it seems, is being held under the Prevention of Terrorism Act at Belmarsh Prison. He’s a British citizen, but a week later he’s not been charged with anything, nor has he been told what he is supposed to have done. His family hasn’t been able to see him yet either.’ He paused. ‘So brothers and sisters, is that right?’
There was a roar of ‘no’.
‘I’m sorry, I can’t hear you. Again.’ He cupped his hand to his ear.
‘NO, NO, NO,’ the audience roared.
‘This is a war against Muslims isn’t it? Can you imagine a white man raising money for the new church roof in the village of Little Snoozing, or wherever, being bundled into a police van and chucked into clink? Of course not!’
Tiwana continued to expand on the theme for the next half hour, getting more and more indignant, and raising the excitement and fervour in the small audience. At one point he did an impression of the Prime Minister: ‘ “The British people must be able to sleep easy in their beds, free from the threat of terrorism”. Well I agree with that,’ Tiwana said. ‘But Bob wasn’t able to sleep easy in his bed, was he? His children, torn away from their father can’t rest easily in their beds now. His wife, not knowing when she will be able to see her husband, she can’t sleep easy in her bed, can she? And all because he wanted to help build a mosque.’
