Birdkill, Books And The Demon Drink

I suppose there is, one way and another, quite a bit of drinking in my books. Space, my silly first effort at writing, was originally packed with smoking scenes precisely because it was written in the throes of me chucking up my Olympian 60 a day smoking habit. I can't say the same for the other books. And while Space does feature the occasional drinkie, my personal favourite is the scene where daft sex-worker and Jessica Rabbit lookalike Kylie discovers the non-alcoholic French drink 'Montalow'...

Of course, thanks to hard-drinking anti-spy Gerald Lynch, there's a good deal of Scotch put away in Olives, Beirut and Shemlan. But it was Paul Stokes in Olives - A Violent Romance who started it:

I dutifully pretended it was, indeed, news to me and thanked him, hung up and poured more whisky into my glass, walking through the house into the garden, where I stood looking over the lights of the city. I went back and poured more until eventually, quite drunk, I held the heavy-based tumbler between my two fingers above the flagstone floor in the kitchen and let it fall, bright and scintillating in the halogen spots as it twisted through the air, shattering on the stone. A thousand reflective shards skittered across the floor. I went, unsteady on my feet, to bed where I lay in the darkness, trying to stop the room from spinning.

There was a hint of sulphur around the Jordanian family in Olives drinking, which provoked no small amount of sniffiness at the time. How could I possibly portray members of a Muslim family drinking alcohol? That never happens in Abdoun. Perish the thought.

I set myself the unenviable task of killing someone using a bottle of champagne in Beirut - An Explosive Thriller. Not battering them to death with it, but using the liquid. It's actually quite hard finding an untraceable poison that dissolves in liquid and I'm not quite sure why my Google life at the time didn't have the cops around with copies of the local pharmacy's poison book in hand. I eventually settled on a nice dose of potentiated chlorzoxazone...

Meier nodded graciously. He sipped his champagne, noticing how fine the flute was, holding the dry, complicated drink in his mouth and revelling in the fact that a lifetime’s work had culminated in this – a new identity, a new life of reward and luxury. The stress of the past few weeks was making itself felt now as he relaxed, a feeling of lassitude creeping over him. He placed the glass down on the coffee table, and Freij reached over to top it up.

‘It is a particularly fine champagne, no, Herr Meier?’

Meier nodded. ‘I have always preferred Sekt, of course, being German. But I have to confess, when the French get it right ...’

Freij sat back in his chair. ‘Lamiable is a small house, a grand cru, of course, from near Tours. Sixty percent Pinot Noir, forty percent Chardonnay. We can enjoy champagne because of the Levant, you know this, Herr Meier? The Chardonnay grape was taken back to France by the Crusaders. My ancestors.’

The champagne I chose to use to kill a man in Beirut was a relatively esoteric single-grower extra brut called Lamiable, which is solely imported into the UK by the excellent Charles Meyrick of Balthazar Wines. Otherwise dependable as they come, Charles turned fink and shared the book with the family who make the wine. They were reportedly somewhat bemused to find their very fine beverage applied in such a casually murderous manner. Sometimes this writing lark is SO worth it all. I'm still laughing, to tell the truth...

Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy had the occasional glass in it, too; Lamiable returned for a cameo role, but old Lynch was on the demon drink with a vengeance again... One of my favourite characters in the book was the tubercular old General in Aleppo, dying his death in a souq that, tragically, events have managed to ensure, at deaths door though he was, he probably outlasted.

The General sat in the middle of the room next to a pot-bellied stove, a dull metal table to his side carrying a bottle of whisky and an overflowing ashtray. There were two glasses, one half-empty. The table was scattered in coins as was, Lynch noticed, the windowsill. The General sat in a wheelchair, his twisted legs covered in a beige woolly blanket. He had withered, his great frame shrunken inside clothes that were too big for him.

The Sandhurst English voice was still strong. ‘Come in, damn you, you Irish bastard. There’s a chair over there.’

Lynch lifted the bottle out of the bag and onto the table. He pulled up the battered wooden schoolroom chair, its scrape echoing in the empty room. The General nodded appreciatively at the Green Label. He unpeeled the foil, pulled out the cork and poured Lynch a stiff drink. He fumbled for the pack of cigarettes and lit one, puffing smoke from grey-blue lips under his great yellowing white moustache. There was an unhealthy sheen on his forehead and he started to cough, a rumbling noise that ended in a great walrus bark.

A Decent Bomber, set in Ireland as it is, has the odd Guinness in it. Pat O'Carolan isn't much of a drinker, perhaps the occasional hot whiskey on a cold night up on the Cummermore Bog is pretty much the only glass he takes. The two Irish politicians, Driscoll and MacNamara, are quite fond of a pint, though...

He glanced at the door of the pub as it admitted sunshine and the clamour of the street. Brian MacNamara’s big frame blocked out the sunlight momentarily. The pub was empty save for the two of them and the young barman, who poured MacNamara’s pint unbidden.

‘Well, now Sean. How’s the man?’

‘I’m good, Brian. Looking forward to the win, you know yourself.’

MacNamara eyed the three-quarters full glass resting on the bar, the creamy froth billowing. The barman slid it back under the tap to finish it off. He laid the pint down with a diffident nod and took himself away to the other end of the bar.

‘Slàinte.’ Driscoll raised his glass and drank. ‘So what’s this great mystery that brings you galloping from campaign headquarters on a Sunday morning right before the election?’

MacNamara brooded over his pint, his keen eye on Driscoll. ‘Quinlan is dead.’

Birdkill has quite a few very intentional mentions of Ksara, that most excellent of wines from a monastically established Château just outside the town of Zahlé. This town, the capital of the Beqaa, nestles red-roofed and splendiferous in the foothills of Mount Sannine. It sits atop the Berdawni River, the banks of the torrent lined with restaurants and shisha joints. In the evening, it becomes magical in the way only the Middle East becomes magical at night. It is to Zahlé Robyn Shaw travelled to work as a teacher, and it was here something terrible happened to her and it was here, in her obliterated past, Robyn's appalling secret lies. And it is in the glasses of Ksara the dark, blood-red spirit of her past is echoed.

Warren delved into the drawer and pulled out a corkscrew. He stripped the lead from a bottle of red wine and pulled the cork. He twisted the label to face her. Ksara. Mariam stared at the cream label with its pencil drawing of the Château nestled in its vineyards, the letters picked out in gold. Her gaze flew to meet his brown eyes. He was smiling. ‘I make it my business to know stuff. It’s how you stay alive when you deal with bad people.’

Anyway, here's a glass to books... Slàinte!

Hooch, Booze, Sid And Eth

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This genteel post over at super-smashing expat blog The Displaced Nation started a chat on Twitter today about the demon drink, particularly as relates to its consumption in the country Americans, for some reason, like to call 'Sordi'.

My first exposure to expat drinking habits in the Krazy Kingdom came in 1986, just after Her Majesty had intervened in the case of a number of 'nuns and strippers' who had been lifted by the gendarmes after a party in Jeddah had been busted in an action that ran contrary to accepted norms. Usually, the police knock on the compound gates, the watchman tells them to hold on a minute and rings around to tell everyone to jettison their stash. Result: squeaky-clean compound and a lot of very happy fish.

This time around, they dispensed with the niceties and (if memory serves me right) about fifty expats were facing eighty lashes each for consuming alcohol. I don't remember if there was any additional punishment for dressing as a nun or a stripper, but I have always had a fond image of the chase across the desert sands in my mind's eye. After Brenda got involved, they were merely deported - and deportation, rather than the traditional punishment meted out to Muslims, became the norm in such cases.

So it was, just after this had all blown over, I found myself in-Kingdom. A chap called Graham was my first introduction to expat weekends in Saudi. Based in Khobar, he was having a party that weekend, would I like to come along? It was a raucous affair and Graham's villa had a bar upstairs, complete with dartboard and a variety of 'lifted' bar accessories such as ashtrays and beer mats.

There were four drinks on offer: 'white' or 'brown', Dr John's blackberry wine or 'beer'.

Now 'white' was 'siddiqi', Arabic for 'friend'. 'Sid' or 'Sin' to some was basically ethanol, whether produced in a bathtub or by a laboratory for medicinal use (a friend was a physics teacher in Kuwait and used to have to keep the ethanol under lock and key. 'Eth' is a popular libation in that place). Ethyl alcohol, cut 5:1 with water, is a potent drink but doesn't induce a hangover as there are none of the impurities you'll find in less direct forms of inebriative condiment. You can lam some juniper berries into it if you fancy 'sin and tonic'. On the other hand, 'brown' was sid with oak chips added. This made it look like whisky, even though it tasted like methylated spirits that had been dripped through rabbit bedding.

An important life tip. You always test a new bottle of sid or eth (or even their close relative, the wonderful Irish libation poitin). Always. Burn some on a spoon, if it burns with a clear, smokeless flame, you're good. If it has any colour to the flame or gives off black smoke, one sip will have potentially lethal consequences. Please don't try this at home.

Dr John's wine was actually delicious, although very strong and sweet. Unlike the sid, its consumption carried  appalling consequences the next morning. And the beer, as all home made beer in desert kingdoms is, was just appalling stuff. You skip down to the supermarket and buy trays of 'malt beverage' (for a short, halcyon, time, authorities were unaware of what tins of brewer's wort looked like, but they copped on pretty fast. Thousands of expats suddenly presenting themselves at the airports carrying huge tins with 'beenz' scrawled on them in magic marker might have had something to do with it), sugar and baker's yeast. Now you put it all in a dustbin and then place on the roof of the villa for a couple of weeks. Bottle the resulting noxious brew and consume at leisure, ideally chilled to the point where you can't taste it.

The following morning saw me awake and staggering out into the blazing sunshine where my kind hosts were barbecuing T-bone steaks for breakfast and downing kiloton-spiced bloody marys. The strongly emetic consequences of Dr John's wine combined with a hammering in my head and a powerful dehydration that made me feel as if I had been steeped in lime overnight. I couldn't take it. More to the point, my liver couldn't take it. Lightweight that I am, I fled for my hotel.

In the intervening two and a half decades or so, I have frequently found myself in the company of chaps enjoying the illicit pleasures of the grape in a number of places and situations, sometimes in highly imaginative ways. But that first encounter with the expatriated liver remains a clear and formative memory.