Suzanne Beecher

Dear Reader,

Just because I feel passionate about something doesn't mean it's going to be easy. It's usually the opposite. Because I care so much about what I'm doing, I talk myself into a crazed frenzy, This is your one shot Suzanne and you need to make it good. Show 'em what you've got! Twenty minutes later after putting on the pressure, I'm paralyzed and I've got nothing. How could anyone possibly live up to all that hype?

So my de-hype method is to trick myself. Instead of sitting at my desk and working on my computer, I leave my laptop behind, grab a pen and some paper and sit in my sunroom, living room, kitchen, or even the bathroom (actually the bathroom is one of my better places to work). Come to think of it, maybe there's a book waiting for me in the bathroom? Plenty of people find inspiration there, maybe I could too? "Writer sequesters herself in bathroom for an entire year, until she finishes book." Hmm, maybe I'll call my agent today and run that idea by him.

Changing the room I normally work in and leaving my computer behind tricks my brain into thinking Suzanne's not really working. Then I relax and the fun stuff happens. Can't really blame it for not showing up sooner, who wants to play with Suzanne when she's stressed out? Even I don't like to be around myself then.

My office is in my home so if things get desperate, staying in my PJs all day is another way to confuse my mind. It's three in the afternoon, Suzanne is still wearing her nightgown, so we must not be working yet. But if you ever try this pajama trick, be sure to unlock the door behind you when you run out to get the mail, it gets kind of awkward standing on your neighbor's doorstep asking to use their phone and trying to explain writing, passion, and tricking your mind.

Thanks for reading with me. It's so good to read with friends.

Suzanne Beecher
Suzanne@firstlookbookclub.com

P. S. This week we're giving away 10 copies of the book Fundamentally: A Novel by Nassaibah Younis. Click here to enter for your chance to win. 

PROLOGUE

September 2019

It wasn't ideal, navigating the zagros mountains on a freezing September night, wearing a trouser suit and ballet flats. The cracked corpse of a river marked the way through the Iraqi–Turkish border.

My handbag slipped off my shoulder as I struggled over uneven ground. I gripped it close with one hand, my other arm outstretched, grasping balance out of the hazy mist.

It had been a thrill, six months ago, buying a designer bag for the UN job. I'd studied the handbags like museum pieces on their backlit pedestals before selecting a buttery mauve tote, holding my breath when I tapped my credit card.

I've since revised my definition of thrilling.

As I stepped onto a rock, it disintegrated into a spray of gravel and I fell, cutting my palms on stones. I turned over, my back against the dirt, the black heavens enormous overhead, covered in millions of tiny stars. The specter of an omniscient God strengthens in moments like this. If you exist, I silently prayed, do me a favor and take it down a notch?

"You is fine, Nadia?" shouted Darban. Twenty meters farther up, his black silhouette was cut out of the sky. The outline of a stiff kaftan, baggy pants, and turban: the traditional dress of Kurdish freedom fighters turned profiteers.

"I'm OK," I said.

I looked down the valley at my burden. She rose through the gloom like an apparition, cloaked in a black abaya and headscarf, that bundle tied to her back.

"How you getting on, Sara?" I called out. The frigid breeze spun my words into echoes that reverberated from the stony surrounds. She paused mid-clamber.

"Bruv," she said into the dark route between us, "you should've got an ISIS smuggler. Man's got us on fucking Everest!"

"Are you dense?" I levered myself back to standing. "An ISIS smuggler would have shot me in the face and recruited you again." "They're sick smugglers, though, you gotta admit." She hoisted the bundle higher up her back.

"I swear to God, Sara, if you stay a fucking fundy after all this, I'll sell you into sex slavery myself."

Her laughter filled the night air. That's the kind of thing she finds funny. It's one of the reasons I love her.

It does not justify what I have done.

ONE

Five Months Earlier

It's not like I was expecting Stalingrad, but Baghdad took the piss. Arriving for the first time, tucked into a UN car, I watched as the city lights refracted through the bulletproof glass. Floodlights hovered over a pickup football game, square lamps up-lit the National Museum, fairy lights dripped down palm trees beside the Tigris River. Why was it so . . . nice? What happened to the rolling blackouts? The electrical transmission network supposedly ravaged by war? Hadn't I donated to help Iraqi women giving birth in cowsheds lit by the flame of a single candle?

Car after car parked along the river's banks: sparkling Audis and BMWs among older Toyotas and Hyundais. I'd thought I was a high roller, leaving London halfway through a monthly Travelcard. Young men unloaded foldout chairs, shisha pipes, and portable barbecues, setting up by the water's edge. I could almost smell the marinated baby chickens, the flattened carp smoldering over charcoal, but the driver stopped me from rolling the window down.

"Security," he said, tilting his head toward rooftops empty of snipers.

I spotted a huddle of teenagers watching TikTok, trying to imitate a dance, before pushing each other over, their laughter subsumed by the honking traffic. Rosy and I used to dance like that.

A convoy of cars started beeping frantically, and my back tensed up as I anticipated a critical incident ahead. Then I saw white ribbon stretched over the hood of a Mercedes, a bride stepping out, her lace dress draped over marble steps as she entered a five-star hotel. Was this fucking 'Midnight in' Paris'? I'd signed up for cluster munitions, not glitter bombs. I spluttered with the indignity of it.

"Everything OK, ma'am?" The African driver looked over his shoulder. What had brought him here? A carefully weighed decision, no doubt. Not juvenile heartbreak, like me.

"I'm fine, thanks. You can call me Nadia." I deserved to be called a lot of things, but 'ma'am' wasn't one of them.

"Ah, it's like Nadia Buari, big actress in Ghana." He nodded at me with approval. "And why you came to Baghdad, Nadia?"

"Oh, I'm here for a job. I'm creating a deradicalization program for ISIS brides. Yeah . . . don't ask."

The driver raised his eyebrows but stayed silent. I checked my phone, hoping for a message from Rosy conveying immense pain at having me ripped from her life. But my SIM card, flabbergasted at having been brought to Iraq, had malfunctioned.

Returning to the window, I strained my eyes, searching for burned- out cars and bullet holes, something to undermine this tableau of festivity, anything to force Rosy into irrelevance. But in the falling darkness, the jollity glowed only brighter.

We entered the Green Zone, a fortified district where international organizations and government agencies hid from the population they claimed to serve. My new home.

My driver deposited me in the car park of the UN compound. He stepped out of the car and lit a cigarette, staring hard at my chest while I heaved my suitcase out of the trunk. Shouldn't misogyny have an equal and opposite chivalric force?

"Over there." He pointed toward a security cabin, his burning red tobacco dancing against the darkness.

I dragged my suitcase over the ground, the evening breeze a warm relief after the intense air-conditioning in the car. A generator rumbled on the far side of the car park, the smell of diesel repelling insects through the air, the stars obscured by a thin gray smog that hung between the city lights and the night sky.

I entered the security cabin, caught my foot on the lip of the doorway, and fell inside. It usually took more than ten seconds to humiliate myself at a new job, but here I was, already achieving a personal best.

A lean Iraqi man in a blue uniform stepped away from his prayer mat and crouched beside me. "You OK, Doctor?"

I was comforted by his use of my title; status gives you scope to absorb minor failures. I hoisted myself up.

"I'm Farris," he said, his Iraqi accent strongly Americanized. He picked up my suitcase and put it on a trestle table that bisected the room. "You must be Dr. Nadia. You're very welcome here."

I watched in horror as he snapped on latex gloves and unzipped my suitcase.

"Real sorry I have to do this," he said, shaking his head. "It's just protocol."

He used his hand condoms to remove every item in turn. A copy of 'Cosmopolitan', the headline screaming: "Everything You NEED to Know about Rimming!" Scores of enormous black underpants interspersed with a few sexy transparent ones. A lilac bullet vibrator, which he unscrewed until a AAA battery shot out. A backup pack of AAA batteries. I pulled out my nonfunctioning phone and pretended to text, my ears throbbing with shame.

My ears were familiar with the feeling. When I was a teenager, my mum found a 'Just Seventeen' magazine hidden in a Quranic exegesis textbook in my bedroom. She lay in wait as I returned from school.

"This is disgusting, Nadia." She waved the naked torso of Pacey from 'Dawson's Creek' in my face. "How can you read such filth?"

I don't read it; I look at it while holding an electric toothbrush to my clit.

"It's the other girls at school," I said, inching back toward the door. "I'm only trying to fit in. I don't enjoy it." Evoking the mysterious dangers of peer pressure normally worked on Mum.

"If they jumped off a cliff, would you follow?" she said. It was her favorite retort, but also the most idiotic. I obviously did a risk analysis before deciding which of my friends' behaviors to imitate. Mum was trying to tear up the magazine, but she kept getting the glossy pages tangled in the staples.

"Muslim friends only from now on," she said.

(continued on Tuesday)

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