F*ck
Or "How to Get Your Second Post Banned for Bad Language".
“I’m Nick.”
The man in the dapper black suit stares at me. Eyes half closed, pursed lips, bemused, slightly disbelieving.
“…Pardon?”.
“Neek”
I pronounce it in that slightly strange and frankly unjustifiable way I always have done when working away from home.
He smiles. His eyes flit to the minder standing beside him and I realise the two of them are starting to snigger. At me, not with me.
I’m a reporter. I’m trying to get the head of Egypt’s leading anti-drugs organisation to tell me how many prescription drug addicts are in his country. It’s a statistic his government may not want uncovering and he’s laughing in my face.
“Can I just call you Mr Garnett?”
This is not the first time this has happened, nor will it be the last. It will follow me around for the rest of my life like a curse.
Let me take you to the year 2013 at the height of the civil war in Syria and the back seat of a clapped out dust-bucket, being driven at breakneck speeds through the washed-out ochre backstreets of Amman, the capital of Jordan.
With my head tucked down low, in a position often adopted by those about to meet their maker on a rapidly descending aeroplane, I know that one sharp slam on the middle pedal and I’ll end up on a medevac back home. My eyes are closed, half out of fear, half out of opportunity. I’m trying to test out a theory.
Left.
Straight on for thirty seconds.
Left again.
I’m hoping to memorise the journey like Liam Neeson did in ‘Taken 2’ but within a couple of minutes I realise I haven’t got a clue where I am. I’m racing through the tiny streets of a Middle Eastern city with a headache that gets worse with every swish and sway of the battered Toyota. Neeson had a distinct advantage. He was packing (according to the internet) a Steyr M9A1 semi-automatic and a miniature mobile phone concealed in an intimate bodily orifice. I’ve got a microphone and an audio recorder to protect me.
We come to a halt.
The car door opens and Wjd smiles his huge toothy grin.
“Was that fun?” he asks.
I’m standing in front of a four storey concrete apartment block with steel girders poking out of the roof. They’re left like that because the owners may, one day, put another top floor on the block but it doesn’t often happen and the girders are slowly rusting away, withering in the afternoon sun. I trip over the kerb on the way in and, not for the first time, wonder why, in the Middle East, they’re always so high.
I’ve only been out of the car for a few seconds and I can feel the sun tightening the skin on my forehead. It’s no surprise that the streets are empty because it’s roasting hot from ten in the morning until late afternoon. I’ll be papyrus in a matter of seconds if I stay outside but, as I’m led into the reception area of the apartment block, the heat disappears in a flash.
“Did you not like that? Like being in a movie!”
Wjd. A man without vowels. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Wjd not smiling. He wears a permagrin. His name means, or at least he says it means, “ecstasy” although he also admits that’s the tenth meaning in the dictionary. He’s what’s commonly and disparagingly referred to as “a fixer” but his real job is making radio and television possible in a foreign country. He’s as precious as gold, helping reporters from overseas make contact with the people they want to interview. He sets up the filming, he organises where they’ll meet and he even translates both sides of the conversation. Without Wjd, nothing happens and now he’s taking me to meet a group of young men planning to make one of the most perilous journeys you can ever imagine. They live on the top floor of the concrete block of flats I’ve just walked into. Across the region, from city to city, country to country, the entrance halls to apartment blocks like this all look exactly the same. Hard marble floors, concrete steps, bare walls, aluminium-fronted mail boxes in reception with dead flowers in a vase on a badly fitted shelf. No lifts. Echoes and darkness. We trudge up the spiral staircase, the light dripping away the higher we go, the echoes falling in on one another. Wjd thumps three times on a heavy, highly varnished, walnut front door. It sounds like Black Rod hammering on the doors of the House of Commons. As the echo fades, it opens and I’m led in. I take off my shoes, checking where I leave them - once bitten, twice shy with that little trick. Don’t worry, I’ll tell you about that another time.
In front of me are three young men. They’re in their early twenties, freshly ironed shirts and long trousers, a formal dress sense that always surprises me in this heat, all of them Syrian. I’m suddenly aware how scruffy I look in comparison. The room is full of heavyweight dark wood sofas. They line the edges of the room and in the middle is a huge glass coffee table with an overflowing ashtray. All around the room, smoke hangs like low lying cloud.
They’re all students - or, at least, they would have been if they hadn’t had to flee Syria. They’ve been living illegally in Jordan for more than two years. None of them has permission to remain and nor do they have a right to flee. Getting no help from the Jordanian government they suspect they’re being hunted. They can’t get a job, because of their status. They’ve no money, because of their status. They have nothing because of their status. There’s no future for them back in Syria and now no future here - the only thing left to do is leave.
Which is precisely what they’re about to do.
This weekend.
The group’s intending to travel to Northern Europe - Britain, Scandinavia, whichever country they can manage to get to, they really aren’t that bothered. Initial bravado gone, they admit they’re terrified. If they head north, back into Syria, they’re heading into a war zone - led by a regime they’ve already fled from once and since they’d last been there, another enemy has risen.
Islamic State, IS, Isis, ISIL, Daesh. They’re operating 50km north of the Jordanian border. You can’t go under them, you can’t go over them. To get North, you have to go through them.
The alternatives aren’t great: to the right of Syria lies Iraq: out of the frying pan, into the fire. To the left, Israel: another frying pan. None of the options sound appealing if you’re trying to spirit yourself away to Europe illegally. They’ve seen the horror stories about crossing the Mediterranean and relying on smuggling gangs but, from the students’ perspective, they’re better than the alternative. Of course they’d only be able to use them if they could pay the price demanded. Unfortunately for them, they’ve got no money. And no way of earning it.
There is, of course, the possibility of escaping via air travel - but that route is also closed off to them and not only because of the financial issue. Their old Syrian passports can’t be used because the regime is an international pariah and, even though the government has issued new passports, they’re only legitimate in a handful of countries, most of which are useless in terms of onboard connections to Europe. The exception is Turkey but, even if the students were able to get there, they would find their onward travel impossible. At $800 it would become the world’s most most expensive yet worthless travel document, about as useful as the middle settings on a dishwasher. At the time I meet them, only Afghanistan and Iraq’s passports are more pointless.
Without any sort of permits, however, the students have just one real option and that involves them sneaking out of Jordan, illegally crossing into a war-torn Syria, heading north and then smuggling themselves into Turkey. From there, they’ll try to head across Europe albeit without any travel documents or money. They will be unwelcome everywhere they go, modern day lepers. We talk for half an hour and I have to admit it’s a pretty miserable conversation. At no point do I think the words: “Yes, but look on the bright side…” are merited. At the end of the interview, I wrap up my cables and get ready to leave.
And then one asks my name. I tell them. They ask me to say it again.
“Nick.”
“Excuse me?”
I pronounce it carefully, “Neek Gar-nett”.
They look at each other in silence. Then one of them bursts out laughing and clapping. The others join in.
“My dear…Neek,” one says. “Over the next few weeks, my brothers and I will face things we can't even think about. We’re terrified at what might happen and the threat of death will be our constant companion.”
I nod and smile and I’m not sure where this is going.
"But thank you," he goes on. "Because you have cheered us up more than you could ever know.”
I have no idea what is going on.
“It is not just us that needs new identities. For your own sake, my friend, you need a new name."
I can’t really blame my parents - although, thinking about it, I can blame them for not realising that I’d go into a career in radio and that the K of Nick and the G of Garnett is a right royal sod to pronounce. That was the least of it, though. They lived in 1960s Liverpool. None of their friends spoke fluent Arabic. How were they to know what their son would be doing decades afterwards?
Now, whenever I’m working in the Middle East, or in a setting where Arabic is the main language, I have another name.
I’m Nabeel - the noble one. I quite like it, especially when you consider the alternative is my real name. You see, Nick in Arabic - (نيك) - and especially when it’s pronounced ‘Neek’ has just one meaning …
F*ck. F*ck Garnett.