"How was it?" asked Chris when Yasmeen came back into the office on Friday after her trip. His interest was genuine: he hoped that the day when he too would be jetting to far-off climes would not be so far away. Not that he felt any resentment that Yasmeen had gone: he already recognised the rights of rank within the office hierarchy and had adapted remarkably well to his junior position.
"Don't ask," said Yasmeen, looking very depressed. Bernice looked up from her plan input documents but said nothing. She could guess what was coming.
"No, come on," Chris said, persisting.
"Yes, please tell us," said Janice, genuinely excited. Apart from her excursion to Birmingham she had never gone further afield than the suburbs of London, and longed to know more about what lay 'out there'.
"Well, if you must know.... We flew out from Heathrow on time. There were a group of about twenty of us fascinated by office carpeting, and we formed a little party along with our guide from the PR company - I think you can imagine, Chris, what she was like." Indeed he could: he had been to several more press conferences on his own after that first encounter together with Bernice, and had been amazed to find that there were all essentially indistinguishable. The PR girlies as rival editor Gervase had called them were clones, the venue was a clone and the presentation was a clone except for a few minor changes in the product names.
"So, anyway," she continued, "We had already been bought several rounds of drinks by the PR woman, and the airline soon added to the quota - and I thought Turkey was a muslim country. Then there was food - quite good - followed by postprandials. Then it was pretty much time to land.
We arrived to find queues for visas - something the PR company had not organised very well - and eventually passed through customs, fought our way past the noisy chaos outside the main exit, and were shepherded to a coach. This whisked us to our luxury five star hotel, and that was that."
"That was what?" asked Janice who had been following intently.
"That was everything," said Yasmeen. "After a cocktail party to welcome us, there was a rather good meal - spoilt somewhat by the gross belly dancer - followed by drinks late into the night. After a breakfast consisting mostly of Bucks Fizz - which I hate - we went to the conference centre attached to the hotel where the amazingly interesting facts about this new carpet were revealed. We managed to contain our gasps of amazement, and passed straight on to drinks, then lunch. Then we were collected by the luxury coach that had brought us, taken back to the airport, put on the plane, given drinks and food, and then we landed. And to think that I had been a bit worried about the ethics of accepting such a blatant bribe from a PR company - you know, allowing one's professional judgement to be swayed and all that. But I realise now that there was no danger of that at all - except possibly being swayed against the company."
"Oh," said Chris.
"No mosques or palaces?" asked Kate.
"Nothing."
"No huge, sprawling souks?" asked Terence, who rather liked the word 'souk' and took the opportunity to use it.
"Not even a soukette," said Yasmeen, lapsing into one of the evolving dialects of the office that turned features in featurettes and pages into pagettes.
"So you didn't discover the secret of the mystery of the East?" Chris asked, even more disappointed than Yasmeen was.
"No...but I did discover something," she said, brightening a little.
"Which was...?" asked Janice.
"I discovered the true identity of Dave's father," said Yasmeen smiling.
Dave choked spectacularly on his cigarette smoke.
"You - what? - I mean...."
"Yes, I found out why Dave knows everything about everything," she said, "It's because his father was a taxi-driver."
"Oh - " said Dave, flicking his eyebrows up and down, and then drawing deeply on the cigarette again. His hands were shaking very slightly.
Yasmeen explained the analysis the taxi driver given her of the situation in Asia, at least as much of it as she could remember.
"Yes," Mowley said, visibly relaxing as he started to analyse and explain, "taxi drivers are often pretty much on the ball. I suppose it comes about from having such a wide cross-section of people in their cabs - the rich, the powerful, the foreign. That and the fact that as well as being inveterate talkers they are usually good listeners too.
His account is probably true as far as it goes, but it's important not to leave Iraq out of the equation in all this. And you've got the Kurds as well, spread inconveniently across the borders of Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria - Imperial Britain's fault again. As are the borders of Kuwait, to say nothing of Israel and the Palestinians. Something in that area is going to give soon," he said meditatively as if beginning to draw together the threads of a hundred different arguments.
As he was talking, gradually everyone got back to work, leaving him finally to soliloquise. Bernice returned to her wretched numbers - the figures that Bob had given her looked impossible on the basis of what he had achieved so far, God knows what she was supposed to do with them. Why didn't Martin do something about that man? she wondered. But amidst her rising anger she also had time to feel sorry for Yasmeen in a way, for the fact that she had lost something in that foreign press trip, a kind of innocence, a sense of awe and wonder. But she was a journalist, and, as such, innocence was not a particularly valuable quality.
