Black Day at the Bosphorus Café

by M. H. Baylis

  ‘More at stake, maybe,’ he said. They just sat for a while, close, holding hands. ‘What were you going to tell me – about the things your relatives said?’

  She looked straight ahead. ‘I wasn’t there, but you know, my job is speaking to the people who lived through that time, and… they didn’t just pack and catch a bus. You know? It was a bad time. Bad things happening. My mother was… She wasn’t well. Growing up, I always knew that. I thought she was just sad, because we’d lived in a lovely village and we’d owned three thousand fruit trees and now we had just this old, rotten house in the city that wasn’t ours and she had to go out to work. And she was sad because of those things, but also because of…’

  Now she looked at him. ‘Bad things happened. On all sides. Everybody has a way of separating themselves from what happened. Everyone admits, now, that their own side did things wrong. But in Nicosia and Limassol, in the cities, the people say it was only the Greeks who came from the mainland, the army officers from Athens. Or it was only the poor Greeks from inland, from the mountains. Same for the Turks. Yes, there were bad things, they’ll say to me, but that was those Turks over there, the ones we never liked, not us… And yet everyone agrees on one thing. Everybody. All the Greeks and all the Turks, the army officers from Istanbul and Athens, the guerrillas in the mountains, everyone says there was one group of Turks, who everyone feared. Monsters. Like those fighters in Iraq and Syria beheading people. But not even with the excuse of God.’ She fell quiet, lost in fog, then spoke again, very quietly, hardly even to him. ‘So they said she was lucky.’

  ‘Who was?’

  She never got to answer, because the three workmen re-emerged with the toolbox, looking puzzled. The Chinese man, the youngest, the shortest, but the one with the authority, was making a call. Then they all got back in the van.

  ‘What now?’

  ‘My first guess was that the Works Department, or whoever’s claiming to be the Works Department would send a crew out. And I was right, so I’m on a roll. My second guess is that, having found nothing to fix, the likely lads are going to go back to base.’

  ‘Which is where?’

  ‘We don’t know. So follow that van,’ Rex said.

  ‘Wow. Cool.’

  The van drove slowly, super carefully, as if the man at the wheel was new to it, or trying to stay out of trouble. They went along all the delicate tendrils of the borough, which were seeming to unfurl in the sudden, unexpected good weather. Down Lordship Lane, in amongst the gleaming, ship-shaped hulks of all the new-builds, Turkish shopkeepers were clicking out striped garden chairs to sit in the warm fumes. Tottenham boys, more image-obsessed than the girls, had stripped hurriedly to vests to air their steroid-pumped six-packs and their faux-prison markings.

  The van halted outside a Tool Hire outfit on an overlooked spur of the Great Cambridge Roundabout. The men got out, and filed into one of the legion of nondescript, shabby-looking offices that dotted the area. Supermarket boxes in the window, dying yucca in the corner: such places fought deportations, shipped crates, sold airline tickets with one laptop, one knackered woman and a microwave.

  This one, according to the name and a quick search on Helena’s phone, housed a charity, handsomely endowed by government and several leading TV celebrity business figures, for helping the long-term unemployed back into work.

  ‘So that man in the council is using these people?’ Helena mused. ‘Maybe for free?’

  ‘They don’t look like the long-term jobless,’ Rex said, observing as the Chinese foreman-type spoke to a doughy, grumpy-looking woman at a desk. ‘More like recent arrivals doing every job going. So what does this place do?’

  ‘Let me find out,’ said Helena. ‘Not you,’ she added, getting out of the car. She’d gone in before he could stop her.

  He wound the window down and watched. It looked like the fat woman was making Helena wait. It could have been a scene from a Sumerian wall-carving: well-fed scribe, desperate petitioner.

  He looked at his phone and then, since there was still nothing happening inside the office, he had another look at the picture he’d taken in Kyretia’s room. He enlarged it slightly, which made it more blurry, but he was able to work out that it wasn’t a pop concert she’d attended with Mina and a small group of male friends. Not unless they allowed pop concerts outside Big Ben. Mina had a flag in her hand –– and it was a bright, multi-coloured affair, also reflected in the banners all around them. They told him something, so did the body language of the group. He flipped to the other photograph he’d snapped that day: the flowers left at Shopping City. That word tatlım: it was really only kids who used it. Kids in love. Mina’s uncle had been right: there was a lover.

  ‘Drive,’ Helena said, out of the side of her mouth as she slid in. ‘She’s looking.’

  ‘I would,’ Rex said. ‘But I haven’t got a license. And you’ve got the steering wheel.’

  She did a double-take, then burst out laughing. They drove onto the roundabout, picked another spur at random and stopped some way down in a residential street full of skips and scaffolding. They were building even here.

  ‘I worked out what was going while she ignored me,’ Helena said, flushed with excitement. ‘They get work for people with no papers. Then when she finally gave me her attention, I told her I was Greek and I needed work.’

  He tried hard not to show his annoyance. ‘What was the point of that? Greeks can work here. It’s part of the EU.’

  She looked at him coolly. ‘Number one, I told her I was Greek because she is obviously Greek.’

  ‘Why obviously Greek?’

  ‘There was a Twelve Apostles Church sticker on the bumper of the car outside. That’s the place we’re having all our meetings for the Greek and Greek Cypriot groups. I’ve even got one there this afternoon. And she was speaking Greek when I went in. Not exactly disguising her identity, Rex.’ She grinned.

  He smiled back, pleased, and yet something about what she’d just said seemed wrong – somewhere in his unconscious, he felt a ticket was being filed, a request to wonder. He ignored it and asked, ‘Number Two?’

  ‘Number two, there are some very poor Greek communities outside Greece. Like in Albania, and the Pontic Greeks in Kazakhstan and Southern Russia.’ She smiled. ‘A job in the UN teaches you all sorts of things.’

  ‘Wow. So you’re a Kazakh Greek who’ll do anything. Did she take you up on the offer? What is the offer? It’s not massage, is it?’

  ‘Cleaning, she said. Tonight, from midnight. I go there, do six hours, and in the morning, she says I go back and I get twenty-five pounds cash. If I do good, she says, maybe she can get me something else. A government job, she said, looking after old people, or maybe in a school.’

  ‘A council job,’ he said.

  She handed him a slip of paper, a Spurs F.C. Post-It with some biro scrawls. The job tonight was for a firm who imported cooked and smoked meats from Southern Europe. They had premises on the White Hart Lane Business Park, a complex of storage units and light industry.

  ‘What are you thinking?’

  ‘We need more evidence. Anyone could have written this.’

  ‘Like a recording, you mean?’

  He nodded, distractedly, before he realised she was holding her phone out to him. ‘What? You got it?’

  She beamed, proudly. ‘I got some video, too. I did that trick you told me – pretended to be putting her number in my phone. Shall I go, tonight, to the meat place, as well?’

  He shook his head, pulled her close. ‘I’ve got better uses for you.’

  * * *

  By tea-time, he was back on the streets again. All the premature heat of the day was drifting upwards, the sky was streaking and the muscle boys in their vests were looking sheepish as they shivered home. Rex wasn’t feeling the cold, though – he had the glazed, soppy grin of a lotus-eater plastered across his face. They’d stolen a three-hour honeymoon in her hotel room before finally parting company. Now he was heading
back down the hill, a cracking good story in his pocket, a date to meet up with Helena later on. Everything looked good.

  He loved the view from the top of Muswell Hill: the marsh plains of north-east London spread out before him like a huge runway. Tower blocks and one church spire, jutting up like a thorn. He took it all in for a moment, before he checked his phone. There were four messages. Maureen, ‘double-checking’, as she tactfully put it, the details for their next appointment. Helena: a mix of semi-colons and dashes and brackets, that he was meant to read sideways. Lawrence: ignoring or forgetting the earlier contretemps, wondering if he’d found out anything useful about disgruntled council employees. And finally one from Ellie, ridiculously, checking he was ‘okay’.

  He replied to the middle two. Maureen, as he saw it, was just bullying him. And Ellie? He’d promised, in the car earlier on, that he’d find out something, something to make her regret suspending him. He now wondered if that was a waste of a good story. She and her bosses had shown no faith in him, suspending him on the say-so of one, disgruntled loudmouth. Why should he show faith in them?

  Changing his mind about heading into the office, he veered off left into the wooded slopes where the nuns’ house sat. Something seemed odd about the undulating path, but it was only when he reached the convent’s doorway that he realised what it was. The one, inefficient bulb had been replaced by a new, gleaming searchlight, adding its own, powerful glare to the retreating daylight.

  ‘Isn’t it wonderful, Rex?’ said Sister Florence as she bustled him in.

  ‘Your bills won’t be if you keep the thing on all day.’

  ‘Peter says he must to adjust the… sensor? Such a clever man! He also has mended most wonderfully the car of Sister Anna-Claire, which did not work without the smoke of plumes for a year!’

  ‘Who’s Peter?’

  ‘We don’t know,’ said the tiny nun with a delighted shrug. ‘God has sent him to our door, asking one day for some food.’ She lowered her voice. ‘Sister Anna-Claire believes he is staying at a hostel, Rex, and we allow to her to believe that, because, you know, she would worry. Actually, you know, he lives out there, in the woods! A true hermit!’

  It made sense of what he’d seen. Not Sister Florence conducting some secret ritual. Just leaving out a drink for a tramp in the woods. A mechanically-gifted one, by the sounds of it. Rex liked that the nuns were so trusting; they were the opposite of just about every other institution in today’s world, which greeted you with latex gloves, a checklist and a terror of being sued. But he wondered if they should be more careful. Who was this Peter?

  ‘I don’t know!’ repeated the nun, cherishing this tiny Tolstoyan mystery in her ordered life. ‘He will speak very little. Alors!’

  She clapped her hands, snapped modes as they went in. The TV wasn’t on. Sybille seemed to be just sitting. Rex cast a concerned glance to Sister Florence.

  ‘She says enough of the detectives. I said okay – then the Gardening World, please? The Great British Bakers? She says no. No TV.’

  ‘I’m bored of it,’ Sybille said. ‘Hello Rex. You smell tired.’

  He sat next to her. It was one of the clear days. He took her cool, slim hand and she squeezed it as Sister Florence discreetly slipped out.

  ‘I need a bath,’ he said. ‘I’ve been working too hard.’

  ‘You always did. That’s why Aurelie wants me to go to her. She doesn’t have to work.’

  ‘Have you heard from her?’

  She didn’t answer. A dog barked outside.

  ‘Aah, there she is,’ Sybille said. They both smiled. Her face was still smooth – the scar tissue didn’t wrinkle.

  ‘Do you want to go to Paris, Syb?’

  ‘Didn’t mean any of it,’ she said.

  He sat up. ‘What you told the lawyers, you mean? You didn’t mean it?’

  ‘An accident. Will you find it? It was careless, he said. One little sin. There has to be forgiveness.’

  He felt his chest locking tight again, the hope ebbing away between their touching fingers. His love had gone. In her place, the Sibylline Sybille of the elliptical phrase and the shrouded hint. A mixture of dark allusions to their shared, unutterable past and sheer gibberish. The nuns, soppy and unworldly, mistook his visits for devotion. Something else, more often, drove him up the hill, though. Fear.

  ‘She is talking so clearly, no?’ Sister Florence said, as she let him out into the stadium-glare of the porch. ‘And sleeping well at the moment, as well, none of the cauchemars… nightmares.’ A hand, light and almost ethereal, on his arm. ‘Ever since Peter. He fix the window catch in her bedroom. And now…’ Beaming serenely, Sister Florence glanced to the sky. Rex was angry.

  ‘Hang on, you’re saying he’s been in her room? Listen – I don’t want you to let men, from the woods into Sybille’s room, Sister Florence. Please.’

  She withdrew, disappointed, the sliding of the bolts a rebuke to his lack of faith. On the way back up the path, on top of the noise from the buses and cars, he felt sure he could hear a man, sobbing somewhere, among the trees. He thought about ringing Sybille’s sister, who, if she was contactable, would surely talk a more fiery brand of sense into the nuns, but that would only make Aurelie come quicker with her van and her plans.

  He stood at the bus-stop. Took stock of the day and the hours left of it. Rang Helena, who was just finishing her meeting at the Church.

  ‘I was just wondering if you wanted to go out somewhere in Muswell Hill instead?’

  There was a long, unexpected silence. ‘Why?’

  He pondered the reasons. He’d suggested, whilst cruising high on a tide of achievements and endorphins, dinner at his place. Now Rex realised he’d have go back and clean. Change the duvet. Tackle the High Street and not only buy food, but cook it. The hour with Sybille had taken some of the shine off the day already; he didn’t want to lose any more.

  ‘Is there some reason why you don’t want me to come to your house?’ she asked sharply, before he’d had a chance to reply. ‘Like you’re not being honest with me?’

  ‘No,’ he said, keeping his tone neutral. ‘It was just an idea. Come to my house.’

  Rammed between pushchairs on a 144, he wondered why she’d been so cold, instantly suspected him of wrong-doing. He hadn’t kept anything from her – he’d told her, on their first evening in The Salisbury, about the wife he’d lost but stayed with. Sybille had never been one of those paranoid wives herself. Her doubts and suspicions had all been focussed inwards.

  One little sin. As the bus lurched, he couldn’t help smiling. At university, still picking off the suckers of her Catholic education, his wife had seriously believed each, individual cigarette and drink was a sin. She was coughing to around fifty venials a day at St Pat’s, and the priests didn’t know what to do with her. He’d teased her for it. And maybe, when she’d said those three words this afternoon, she’d been referring to that, happier part of their life together. Or to a different sin altogether.

  Careless, he said. But who was he? Anyone? Someone? No one? Or the person he’d been wondering about for twelve years.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  ‘I wish we were walking to the real Bosphorus for breakfast.’

  ‘You’ve been?’

  He nodded, squeezing her hand. ‘You haven’t?’

  ‘For work, to a couple of places, yes. Antalya, Adana… but just in, and then out. It’s not easy.’

  ‘You mean, visas and suchlike?’

  She shook her head. ‘No, I mean… I speak Turkish and I have Turkish colleagues and…’ She pursed her lips. ‘I don’t think I can make you understand.’

  They left it there, walking hand in hand to the café in the morning sun. He knew there were parts of her he couldn’t understand. He didn’t mind; everyone was like that, really. She’d visited, as planned, last night, and not objected to eating takeaway lahmacun from the Pamukkale, nor to the hastily spruced interior of his home. She’d been in no rush to leave, at any rat
e. And wasn’t that enough, for now?

  They were walking down the short parade of shops, opposite the bus-station, past the Trabzonspor Social Club with its obligatory skip and scaffolding. Inside, a couple of old men were staring at the tv. Normally, there were football matches showing but today, it seemed to be some kind of newsflash, with ticker-tape going across the bottom of the screen, a vividly made-up reporter by an ambulance. Outside the club, another pair, in classic OAP Turk-garb – vintage suit, cable knit v-neck, flat cap – were staring up at the scaffolding, muttering.

  ‘Not happy,’ Helena said, as they walked by.

  ‘About what?’

  She shrugged. ‘I couldn’t catch it.’

  Rex remembered Bilal talking about his father: unhappy at his usual watering hole, taken to brooding alone at the factory. ‘Would you be happy if they turned your favourite club into a building site?’

  They waited at the lights. ‘They could always spend time with their wives.’

  ‘You’ve clearly never been married,’ he said.

  She poked him playfully as they crossed over. Then they went into the Bosphorus café, where Keko was lecturing the Hungarian girl about the extractor fan.

  He spotted them and came over – the same old man, yet somehow, lesser. ‘Thank you,’ he said, solemnly shaking their hands after they’d ordered. It was as if they’d shown him a kindness by coming in. There weren’t many who had, to be fair. People still seemed to fear death – thought it was catching.

  ‘It’s a good thing to be at work,’ Rex said. He meant that. It had saved him, after Sybille, although his career on the nationals had been part of the wreckage. An old colleague of his from The Times had rung him, while he was still having five times a week therapy up at Highgate Hill, to tell him about this local title she’d just bought, in a hard, scruffy, little borough where they’d never be getting a Waitrose. Was he really not planning to go back to it now?

  Keko nodded his agreement, slowly. ‘Same when Mina’s mother die. I stay working, just working – baby in corner. In corner,’ he repeated, his dull gaze pulled over to the corner where Mina would never again sit.