Chapter 1: Through The Wrong Door And Into Big Trouble

It was three in the morning and Katie O'Brien felt like death. Or even worse. Maybe death was better than how she felt! For a moment or two, as the horrible throbbing pain in her head grew worse and worse she considered the alternative with great care. Yes! Death was certainly better. Her mouth tasted unspeakably foul. She felt sick, thirsty and in need of a pee - in urgent need of a pee

What a bash the final night of the assignment had been! Wow! But, why have an expense account if you don't use it? She inched her way through the gloom to the bathroom door. One good pee and then back to bed. A few hours deep and therapeutic slumber and she would be fine again - almost. Good enough to get the flight home and she wouldn't be the only one with a hangover. Not by a very long way! She remembered THAT much of the previous evening! There had been quite a number of fellow journalists whooping it up with her. Many a struggling distillery and brewery owed their salvation to the heroic efforts and loyal patronage of the likes of Katie and her Press colleagues! All were prepared to sacrifice his/her liver for the sake of the good of the drink trade.

She fumbled towards the door, opened it and stumbled through - onto a fire escape. She was outside the hotel in the cold night air and overlooking the street! The massive metal door clanged to behind her. Her brain wasn'tall that clear, but still took in the fact that life had just taken a turn for the worse.

"You bloody oaf. It really is 'poor old Katie' now and with a vengeance." she cursed herself, groaning, and turned to go back, sick with the knowledge that there was no way back! Sure enough, the door had no outside handle and fitted so flush that you could scarcely see the join. Great workmanship! What now?

"Another fine mess I've got myself into!" Just how much of a mess, she was about to find out and the prospect did awful things to her already disturbed stomach!

Being locked out of the rear of the hotel with the front entrance in the next street was bad enough. Worse still was that it was the middle of the night and the night temperature in this Central Asian republic was enough to freeze the vital organs off a brass monkey. On top of all this lay the fact that Katie always slept nude. That was the worst part of her predicament, but there was another. Urgent messages coming from her bladder only reinforced Katie's rapidly forming feeling that this was shaping up to be a Bad Day!

The immediate imperative was to relieve her bladder and find a less exposed position in which to do it. Being caught like this in a rather Puritanical country with a fundamentalist Islamic regime could be expensive and time consuming to say nothing of painful - fatally painful! You could be fined for showing your ankles if you were female and a local. And although Westerners, especially western journalists, had been granted a lot of licence in the few days of the Summit, this tolerance would hardly extend to a nude woman urinating in the open air, even if she were a respected financial journalist and an honours graduate of a prestigious university.

And the Economic Summit was over. The delegates and press were preparing to go home, and some had already left. The world statesmen had all arrived back home by now. Last night's little shindig had been something of a rearguard action. What was that story she had seen before she came out here to the central Asian backwater of El Jabarah? Some Western resident of this country beaten on the soles of her feet for immorality? She supposed that a nude female squatting down in a public place to relieve herself would be deemed immoral. Even in her own country with its relatively laid back social mores - its encouragement of cultural and lifestyle diversity - a conviction for pissing naked in the street would not look good on one's CV.

She saw no way of getting back in through any of the windows - they were quite inaccessible, even to athletic young Katie.

Down the fire escape she went, knocking on each door as she descended and getting no response. Her heart sank a little with every floor. At the bottom, in the area, she found a place to relieve herself. Like being in the Brownies again on my first camp, she thought, her head still throbbing with pain and her stomach threatening cast up its contents - like Jonah from the whale's belly!

She looked down at herself in the increasing light and saw that she was even less covered than she had realised. It came back to her now, how she had painstakingly removed all the varnish from her finger and toe nails before slumping into bed. Why, oh why, had she done that! Only her lovely butterfly tattoo still adorned the dimpled side of her left buttock. Nice butterfly!