Black Day at the Bosphorus Café

by M. H. Baylis

  ‘Still not from Aurelie one word of the hour and the day,’ she whispered, leading Rex down the damp, ancient-smelling corridor lined with nuns’ needlework and childrens’ drawings.

  The hour and the day. For a year now, his wife’s sister, Aurelie, had been pressing to have Sybille moved to her house on the outskirts of Paris. Aurelie didn’t drink any more, she was married to a high-ranking policeman and in this new, sober form had become determined to improve her sister’s care – after several decades of only caring about vodka.

  Rex did not dislike Aurelie. He’d felt sympathy for the old, self-loathing one, and been as fond of her intermittent bursts of irony, insight and song as he’d been amused by the stories Sybille told him about her sister’s wild childhood. There was one he particularly enjoyed, about a convent boarding school on the outskirts of Nantes, so pious, so regimented, that the girls sent to it by their top-drawer families were often just one step away from jail. The nuns of Nantes had sent Aurelie back home after a fortnight. They’d even refunded the fees.

  But he didn’t know this new version of Aurelie, and he found he couldn’t trust it. He didn’t trust that the new phase, or the policeman, or the grand, renovated house would last. He accepted that there were places where his wife might be more comfortable, eat better food, be less exposed to the cave-like damp of an old nunnery and to the low-quality TV crime dramas obsessively watched by her main carer, Sister Florence. He wasn’t convinced those things mattered to Sybille, though. He wasn’t, except in odd, painful moments when she would pat his hand or use a phrase from the old-time, convinced that he mattered to her either. But he was not prepared to let go.

  A gear-shift had occurred one damp and foggy Friday, four months back, when Aurelie had arrived, in triumph, accompanied by the policeman husband and a brace of fine lawyers from both sides of the Channel. Invited to prove, with binding effect, that she understood the proceedings and their consequences, Sybille had done so brilliantly, promptly handed power of attorney to her sister and declared her wish to move to Paris. Just a few short moments later, as witnessed by both Rex and Sister Florence, and possibly the French policeman too, Sybille had started talking, incoherently, about her dead father being in the next room and her equally dead mother finding a hammer in a meadow, both of which were garbled references to a recent episode of ‘Midsomer Murders’. But Aurelie and the lawyers had had the twenty seconds of clarity they’d sought. And Sybille was going to be moved.

  Dates had come and gone. There was trouble finishing the downstairs room she’d be in, then a snarl-up with the specialist transport. Sybille’s belongings had been packed and unpacked again. And now there was a new date, set for a fortnight hence. Rex and the nuns were supposed to start re-assembling the dozen cardboard boxes they’d got, for free, from the devout Brazilian girls who staffed the StoreSpace down the hill. They were waiting for a final go-ahead from Aurelie. But now she had become hard to reach.

  ‘She told as well that she would pay all the expenses for the last quarter,’ said Sister Florence. ‘So I add them up, I write them, I email. Rien.’

  ‘I’ll pay them,’ Rex said. ‘Don’t send me the bill, just… you know…’

  Sister Florence understood: she would only tell him the figure owed. Another of the nuns, Sister Mary Sulpice, always sent the itemised account when it was her turn to compile it, and it pained Rex to see it, like seeing his wife laid bare, next to the quarterly total for her sanitary towels and suppositories. It wasn’t his delicacy, but a respect for her, for the corners of her life she’d kept discreet. He’d had to buy her tampons once, just once, when she’d been pole-axed with flu. And Sybille, mortified, had dragged herself from bed to leave the money, penny for penny, silently, on the table. That was just the way she was.

  ‘You are sure you can pay?’ Sister Florence asked, as they went in to the TV room where Sybille spent her days. ‘I thought that you were making the grand renovations to your own chateau now.’

  ‘I’ll get hold of Aurelie,’ Rex said, avoiding the topic of his house. ‘But all the while we’re here, I pay.’

  A brief nod and then Sister Florence was back in joyful nun mode, clapping her hands and exclaiming in a bright, sing-song voice about the handsome man who had come to call. Sybille stared sightlessly at the television screen. ‘Midsomer Murders’ again.

  He kissed her. Sometimes he tried hard not to breathe in the smell of her, the Mitsouko perfume she’d worn, every day of her adult life – with him and then in this after-world. He took her hand, with its long cool fingers, unchanged, so perfectly unchanged that if he only looked at that, it could be as if the accident had never happened. Sometimes she squeezed his fingers, sometimes she did nothing. Today was a nothing day.

  ‘A mess to clear up,’ she said. ‘A terrible mess. Ran and hid. From the mess. A mistake.’

  ‘Alors, Sybie, tu sais que L’Inspector Barnaby va le trouver!’ exclaimed Sister Florence brightly, patting the TV set fondly, like a relative. ‘Comme toujours!’

  ‘Yes, found. Always found out,’ said Sybille indistinctly. The pins holding parts of her jaw together were eroding, and another operation was due. Still, sometimes, a word or a whole sentence would come out with shocking clarity, as if recorded long ago. As now, when she suddenly said, ‘Rex.’ When she had his attention, she asked, ‘Will you go, or shall I?’ and laughed like a docker.

  Sister Florence left them, and he stayed for about another ten minutes. When he let himself out he felt, as he so often did, drained and slightly spooked. He knew that he imagined things sometimes, but he also knew that there was some eerie part of his wife still there, trapped in a dark room and angry with him for it. Comments like that one – will you go or shall I – were her dream-like way of telling him he was not forgiven.

  As he headed back up the gloomy, whispering pathway in what was now driving rain, he knew he was not mistaken this time. A figure moved in the trees to his right. He stopped still, in the middle of the track. It seemed, at first, to be hideously deformed, and he almost laughed aloud with relief when he realised it was Sister Florence, wearing a navy kaghoul over her habit.

  But what was she doing there? It seemed to be some sort of pagan, or at least, non-Vatican-approved ritual. As the downpour continued, she laid out a glass on a tray at the base of a tree, and filled it with some clear liquid from a flask. Next to the glass, she placed a saucer, and on it, something flat and round, like rusks or wafers. Having laid these offerings out, she waited in contemplation for a moment, crossed herself and turned to scurry back through the mud and mist. Rex darted behind a bush and watched her go into the house. He wanted to look at the tree, but he felt as if he’d intruded on something private, a rite he hadn’t been meant to see. Puzzled, he hurried on to the lights of Muswell Hill.

  He was even more puzzled, when, checking his phone in the orangey light of the bus-stop, he saw a text from Helena Georgiou. He’d left her a couple of messages during the afternoon and early evening, all unanswered.

  Sorry. At hotel now. Call me. Helena.

  He rang. She didn’t sound overjoyed to hear from him.

  ‘I’m sorry. I had a migraine. I could feel it getting worse and I knew I was going to be sick, so I just ran out. It’s ok. I told the group lady. And your friend Terry is looking after my camera.’

  I bet he is, Rex thought. He also thought how strange it was, that she’d seemed so lively just before the migraine had forced her to leave the Community Centre. But he’d known many women do that – his mother, Sybille, Susan – carry great, regular lorry-loads of pain without making it that obvious.

  ‘How are you feeling now?’ he asked. ‘I’m actually up in Muswell Hill if you –’

  She interrupted, as if she’d been waiting for it. ‘Not tonight. Okay, Rex? I’m sorry. I’m feeling better but I’m not at my best. Okay?’

  He felt startled by her tone of voice. It was as if she was backing out of an agreement, and expected him to argue.


  ‘It’s fine. Another time,’ he said coolly, and waited for her to reply. When she didn’t, he added, ‘Let me know what you’re up to.’ And left it at that.

  It was just after eight – that oddly deserted hour in the outer city, when everyone was in the pubs or on their sofas. He sailed down the hill on a bus, all steamed-up windows and sticky floors. His only companions were a pair of pre-pubescent lovers, and an old Irishman saying over and over, into his mobile, ‘Hackney Wick? Hackney fooken Wick?’ as if he’d been asked to go to Baghdad.

  The teenie-snoggers troubled him, with their school bags at their feet and their ink-stained fingers in each other’s hair. He thought about Mina, and how these kids, not so much younger than her really, would live, and she wouldn’t. And then, as he’d known it would, his mind turned to his wife’s words.

  The terrible mess. She referred to it with increasing regularity now. And to hiding it. As she had done. Leaving it for him to find. As he did, in the bins outside their house, a week after the accident that changed everything. ‘Do you want to film us or sum’n, bruv?’

  ‘Perv!’

  The kids had stopped grappling with each other and were glaring at him – angel-faces with scowls copied from the TV. They thought he was staring at them. He looked out of the window. The traffic was heavy and the bus was crawling through the rain towards the Turnpike Lane crossroads. There was a Greek-owned off-licence – the only one shut on Sundays in this neck of the woods. Outside it, a thick-set man was hitting a black girl, a clutch of people enjoying the spectacle. Mobile phones started to appear. People disgusted him sometimes. He wiped the window with his sleeve. Then he saw: it wasn’t a man hitting a woman at all. She was beating the shit out of him.

  She, in this case, was Kyretia – the receptionist at the Students Union, who’d been overcome with grief at Mina’s death. And he was Haluk, the beefy Security Guard.

  A police car appeared. Rex rang the bell, but the driver was new, a stickler, and wouldn’t let him off before the stop. Rex had to watch uselessly from his rain-spattered window as the response team, stiff with assorted weapons and policing gadgets, lumbered out of their vehicle to bring peace to the street.

  By the time he’d been permitted to leave the bus, of course, and worked his way back, through the rain, to the off-licence, everyone had gone save for a local notable called Bird, a scrawny, elderly black man who spent his time on the streets, drinking strong lager and shouting. He seemed to be replaying match highlights from the fight in his mind, in between dainty sips from a can of 11% Navigator.

  ‘Black girl give ’im licks,’ he enthused yeastily. ‘Proper licks!’

  Realising that the night was, to all intents and purposes, over, Rex went into the off-licence. He irritated the man in there by forgetting to ask for ouzo instead of raki, added some weak-looking Cypriot lagers to the haul by way of apology and was just having them wrapped in paper when his phone rang.

  Helena. ‘I’m sorry, Rex. I’d just woken up. Is it too late to change my mind? You’ve probably gone back down the hill now, haven’t you?’

  Rex eyed the off-licence man warily, wondering if it was worth asking for a refund. He decided against it. After all, Helena might like a nightcap.

  * * *

  Rain hammered on the window as the tiny kettle came to a cheerful boil. Down the corridor: sounds of trolleys, smells of bacon. They’d woken early – both, it seemed, a little unused to having another life-form in the bed. Talked softly for a while, made love again, fallen asleep again. Now it was nearer the business end of the morning. Helena had showered and was sitting on the end of the bed, applying some herby-smelling solution to her hair.

  ‘Lunch?’ he asked.

  ‘I told you, I’m driving to Bristol today. I showed you that horrible pink car the hire people gave me… Do you actually remember anything from last night?’

  ‘Yeah. You’re… Francesca, right?’

  A cushion hit him in the face. He threw it back. He remembered a great deal. From before they took their clothes off. They’d talked about their childhoods – of hers with a vanished father, in a house deserted by Turks. Of his life, too, in a Lincolnshire council house, with a similar father-shaped hole in it. There, perhaps, the similarities had ended.

  ‘It’s bleeping,’ she said, tossing his phone at him. ‘If it’s Francesca, tell her she’s welcome to you.’

  It was emails: the first of the morning police, fire and ambulance updates. A woman had assaulted a man on Turnpike Lane last night. That had to be the fight he’d witnessed, between Mina’s friends – Kyretia and Haluk. He wondered if anyone had been charged, and if D.S. Brenard would volunteer any information.

  Further east towards Tottenham Hale, a mother taking her child to the school’s Breakfast Club at 6 am had been struck by an entire windowpane falling out of a new build. The kid was unharmed. The mum was in the North Middlesex hospital, injured but all right. He shuddered. Helena, zipping up her skirt, asked what the matter was.

  ‘I’m not sure if it’s the thought of a kid nearly being orphaned by dodgy building work, or the thought of a kid being dropped at school at 6 am. When did that start?’ He looked at her as she buttoned her blouse. He liked to see a woman get dressed. As much a privilege, he thought, as the opposite.

  ‘My mum left the house at 5 every morning to go to the hospital. It’s what she had to do. We got ourselves up.’ Her face darkened as she clipped earrings on. ‘Actually I got my brothers up, even though they were older.’

  She wasn’t close to her brothers, he’d gathered that much over the course of the preceding evening. For her mother, effectively widowed overnight, forced by the conflicts of 1974 to leave an idyllic farm village for a stranger’s tiny house in the city, she seemed to have more sympathy. But not necessarily more affection. He found he didn’t mind that. They were both alone.

  ‘It’s sweet that you think about the kids,’ she said, bending over to kiss him. ‘Perhaps you really want to be a daddy?’

  ‘Maybe,’ he said. He found he couldn’t say anything else. Luckily, she’d disappeared back into the bathroom, to do whatever women do.

  He got up, rubbed his bad foot, hunted around for his pills and some fluid to knock them back with: these were his morning prayers. He spilled a little water from the glass as he put it back on the desk at the window, splashed some drops on a buff folder. Papers shifted out as he picked it up and dabbed it. She’d done a lot of research into the borough’s Cypriots: printed up articles from the web, even recent articles from his own paper – about the fire at Toprak’s factory, the old man suffering a stroke in his van.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  She was in the bathroom doorway. She’d put her make-up on. He’d never known a woman do it in private before. He stepped away from the desk, as if he’d been caught doing something wrong. As, in a sense, he had.

  ‘Sorry, I spilt something.’

  She crossed to the desk, stuffed the folder and a couple of other items in her open briefcase, her back to him.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said again lamely. She turned round, serious.

  ‘You’ve ruined it. Years of research. A lifetime. Destroyed.’

  ‘Sod off,’ he said, grabbing her as she laughed. They kissed. Fell back together on the unmade bed. His hand crept up her thigh.

  ‘Oh all right then,’ she said.

  He was first in the office, before even the Whittaker Twins. He found himself wanting to look up Cyprus, to understand more of what she’d been talking about, to know more of her. She’d grown up, he knew, in the divided city of Nicosia, but the family had fled from a village in the northern part of the island when it was invaded by Turkey in 1974, the year of her birth. At some point in this flight, it seemed, Helena’s father had either been killed or disappeared, and she’d been born without ever knowing him.

  ‘So I understand the hope,’ she’d said last night, solemn and seriously beautiful in the candlelight of a near-deserted pizza restaurant
. ‘I understand the hope of these people when some more bones appear, when they take the test and they get the slip of paper. And the flat feeling that comes afterwards. No. Because you were stupid to hope. You feel stupid. And they tell other people, so even if they’ve got someone missing, they won’t take the test, because they don’t want to hope and feel stupid either. That’s what we’re up against. Except I’m not against it. I understand it.’

  She wasn’t stupid. Anything but. He knew she wouldn’t be here long. And he didn’t like casual flings, never had. But it felt good, being with Helena, like something he’d been missing for a long time. He didn’t want to forgo it, just because he knew it would end.

  He shook himself, and got down to making some notes of potential stories to discuss at the conference. Then he looked up the two men who’d been occupying his thoughts much of late.

  He still possessed enough ‘O’ level German to work out that Rostam Sajadi was much as he’d described himself. A businessman based in Hanover, which wasn’t a million miles from Celle, the Yezidi enclave Lawrence had mentioned. Sajadi owned a sweep of dry cleaning outlets from Rostock to Bonn, and also in Stockholm, and was a member of a charitable business-people’s association in both countries. His presence on a Turkish website was harder to interpret: from the assorted maps and cgi-cityscapes, it looked like he was involved in building a new town, called Yenişakir, somewhere in the predominantly Kurdish southeast of the country. There was a picture of Sajadi, and several others, beaming proudly in hard hats and clutching ceremonial trowels. Was he financing the place, Rex wondered? Or just doing the dry cleaning? The point was, Sajadi was a man of influence – very different from his brother-in-law, Keko, a communist with a shop and a caff in Tottenham.

  A search for illuminating details on the Student Union President, he of the chequered past, Jan Navitsky, yielded nothing. About his father, though, also called Jan Navitsky, there were some surprises. Navitksy Senior wasn’t, as Maureen had said, the Mayor of Minsk, but of a town to the south called Salihorsk. Far from being of the mouth-breathing, leather-coated kriminalny type, Navitsky Senior was an earnest-looking, suited bureaucrat, up to his elbows in the country’s pro-democracy movement. The BBC World Service loved him; the Poles, the Germans and the US State Department hoped he was the future. There was, certainly as far as Rex could divine, with no knowledge of Belarussian and five spare minutes’ web-time, no indication of any crisis or emergency, either in the man’s private or political life, that might have required the son to fly off home at a moment’s notice. So perhaps Jan the Younger wasn’t a chip off the old block. Perhaps Jan was rotten for his own reasons.