Black Day at the Bosphorus Café

by M. H. Baylis

  ‘Nobody was ever caught,’ Rex began. ‘For the accident your wife had?’

  Keko sat down with them – an unprecedented honour. ‘Germany Police. You –’ He mimed an uncouth unofficial finger, pointing at Rex. ‘Gastarbeiter. Turk. Not interest. Not look.’

  ‘You should have told them you were Kurdish,’ Rex said.

  Keko shrugged. ‘Same as here. Most people don’t understand that Kurds is not Turk. Anyway… I am communist. Man first, father number two, communist number three …

  ‘And Kurdish?’ Helena asked.

  Keko paused, thinking, as two mugs of tea arrived at the table. ‘Kurdish number ten!’ He leant over, intent, a brightness briefly returning to his eyes. ‘You know, before, hundreds of years before, only the high… er, chiefs? Only high chiefs, the aghas are call themself Kurd. Everyone else – Christian, Muslim, Yezidi – just…’ He mimed something tiny with his gnarled fingers – little people. ‘Nothing. No Kurdish nation. And all the tribes of Kurdistan – you got Aruk peoples, Bejani, Kucher, Zerzan peoples – it means nothing! If one people get war, go join another tribe. One tribe get good rich, okay, more tribes are joining in them. See? Tribe is meaning nothing. Kurd – nothing. Just a name.’

  He shook his head, and fell quiet, the gleam in his eyes fading again as the grief returned. Rex wondered if Keko had always felt this – if he’d hardened towards Kurdish nationalism after Mina’s death. Or someone else had changed his mind. ‘You sound like Rostam.’

  Keko frowned. ‘What?’

  ‘I’ve talked to your brother-in-law. Rostam. He says the same kind of thing.’

  Keko flinched slightly, as if slapped. ‘Rostam? Rostam is very high peshmerga! He is a soldier who faces death. In Iraq… at Kore… 1991… Rostam, one hundred fifty peshmerga fight to Saddam. Whole Iraqi army beat by one hundred fifty peshmerga. A lot of Yezidi peoples, they won’t fight. Won’t join with other peoples. Rostam? Rostam broke with his people to join peshmerga. He is very high. Hero of Kore. Loving Kurdish people very much.’

  It explained, perhaps, the timid reverence of the man in the gözleme shop, who’d repeated over and over that Mina’s uncle was ‘very high’. It explained, considerably less well, the things Rostam had said to Rex. A man who had professed to loathe politics, to despise the Turkish Kurds’ resistance group, the PKK, and even his own family, was a hero of the Kurdish rebellion in Iraq. Why would he cover that up?

  Rex wanted to ask more about Rostam, but just then, there was a small crash and a shout from the street opposite. It looked at first as if some minor piece of masonry had fallen onto the car of one of the dandies having patterns shaved into his hair in the Kutz Karib Barbershop. As the vehicle’s aggrieved owner, still swathed in a gown, came out to remonstrate, and a stooped, hairless Turkish elder emerged simultaneously from Trabzonspor, there came another, greater crash, as the scaffolding collapsed, bringing much of the upper floor of the building with it. Over the road, people darted into the Bosphorus for safety and stayed there, watching through the windows in fascinated horror as a plaster-cloud swirled amid car alarms and human cries and a timpani symphony of hollow poles hitting others on the way down.

  Helena was already on the phone to the emergency services. Rex switched his camera on to video and rushed out. People were steaming in already, some to gawp, some to help, the odd one to grab what he could find and run. Rex shouted at them to get back.

  ‘It’s not safe. The whole thing could collapse! Get back!’

  ‘Why don’t you get back then?’ shouted one of the barbers from Kutz. Pure Haringey: macho ball-busting, even while a building collapsed.

  He’d never seen so far inside a Turkish social club. The back, where they served tea and coffee from a counter, was intact, although covered in glass and dust and smaller pieces of masonry. The TV had crashed off its bracket onto the floor, but it was still on: the Mata Hari-like reporter interviewing some schoolkids now, words he recognised on the ticker-tape. Polis. Fanatik.

  Fortunately, the club had had few customers at 10.30 on a Wednesday morning, and the majority had made their way, dust-frosted and bewildered, to the opposite side of the road. One man had what seemed to be quite a bad head wound, and Helena stopped him from wandering dizzily in the road and made him sit down. Then, as the dust cleared further, it became apparent that there had been one, serious casualty.

  The bald man who’d come to the front when the first piece of stone had fallen was lying under a huge chunk of wall. He was white with shock, groaning faintly, blood on his lips. He was Bilal’s father, Kemal Toprak.

  ‘Help me get it off him!’ Rex shouted. No one moved.

  Rex grunted as he tried to shift the slab which had scraps of some old, floral wallpaper still attached. The old man was no longer groaning, only making a husky whirr, like a knackered clock, while he breathed in and out.

  ‘Here, Rex!’

  He looked up. Terry was opposite, levering a scaffolding pole under the slab. He pulled down, Rex dragged and the thing began to shift. Others had joined them now, mostly the barbers and customers from the next-door shop and it came away – leaving the old man broken beneath on a bed of milky rubble, staining slowly carmine with his blood. Helena knelt beside him, checking his vital signs as the first of the emergency vehicles pulled in.

  ‘It was waiting to happen,’ one of the patrons kept saying, to anyone who caught his eye. He was an unhealthy-looking man, a mouth permanently open, a face the colour of greaseproof paper. ‘I was in the building trade. And I kept telling them. Don’t care who’s signed off on it. Not safe.’

  Terry paused, mid-snap, to wink at Rex, any quarrel of theirs long buried. ‘You gonna take some notes, big man?’

  He had just started to do that as Kemal Toprak went into a shuddering series of convulsions. Helena was no longer anywhere near him. Looking round in confusion, Rex saw her a little way further in, staring at a picture on the wall of the café.

  ‘He’s having a fit!’ Rex shouted. ‘Helena!’

  She glanced back at the man as the ambulance crew arrived. Then, briefly, at the photo on the wall again, before she rushed over to join to the paramedics. Kemal seemed to have relaxed again. His eyes were wide open.

  Rex stared at the picture, wondering what had caused Helena to leave a man on the floor on the verge of death. The image offered no clues – it was just a bunch of young men in army gear. One had an award-winning moustache, and from the foppish hair and the exuberant sideburns on all the participants, Rex guessed, they must have assembled for it sometime in the mid-1970s. In Turkey? In Cyprus?

  He turned round, still filming, then abruptly switched his phone off. The ambulance crew were pronouncing Kemal Toprak dead. His son, Bilal, who’d arrived wheezing with exertion on the scene himself only a few minutes before, collapsed with shock, cut his head, and had to go to hospital with the others – a tragic sort of gate-crasher. Helena seemed to have vanished into thin air.

  Across the road, as Rex was preparing to leave, Keko was pulling the café blinds down. He had been ordered by the police to vacate for safety reasons. ‘Black days,’ he muttered to himself. ‘Too much black days.’

  * * *

  In the office: the silent, ordered frenzy, peculiar to newsrooms. The smell, too, was one associated with deadlines: coffee on the breath; deodorant and perfume hastily sprayed onto shirts no longer fresh; hot paper and ink. Ellie and Terry sifted through images from the Trabzonspor collapse – for the website, for the Friday print edition, for the nationals.

  Behind them, Rex wrote up what they had, chased quotes and verifications, updated the earlier pieces about the falling window at Tottenham Hale to link with the newer, bigger possibilities. New buildings were going up everywhere. How many of them were safe? Despite, or because of the seriousness of the events, it felt exciting. It always had: a drug-like tingle, to be against the clock, thinking clearly, reacting quickly, part of something. And to be back on board. He’d brought the scoop straight to E
llie. A peace-offering. A bribe. Whatever it was, she’d been unable to refuse it.

  Behind the questions he was asking publicly, others were pooling. How many buildings might be unsafe because the planning office was bent? In how many other places, in the nursing homes and the schools and the housing blocks, were the checks not being made, the borough’s residents being sold short, because the work was being farmed out to the gang-masters? There was one thing he no longer doubted: he belonged here, doing this.

  Ellie took a call in her office. There was a hiatus, nothing more to be done until she gave her verdict on the web copy he’d just drafted. Rex fetched a cup of water. It was the first thing to pass his lips since a few sips of tea that morning in the Bosphorus. He was wearing jeans – the only unfamiliar element to the situation. His suit trousers had been knackered in the building collapse. His spare suit trousers were at the dry cleaners. No one had ever seen him in jeans before; everyone kept mentioning it.

  Lawrence, standing by the water-cooler, in his black slacks and slip-ons, made the obligatory denim-related comment but then added, ‘Good to have you back.’ Which was Lawrence all over – annoying, but all right.

  ‘Thanks. It was a short retirement.’

  ‘Talking of which, thank you for your text about Jean in the council. A Mrs Jeanette Crosby, in fact. And you’re quite right – she left the council four weeks ago, after 26 years’ dedicated service. And guess what else? Was a runner-up in our poetry competition two years on the trot.’

  ‘A disgruntled poet. Of course. Good work. We should talk to her.’

  ‘I tried. Knocked on her door. She lives on the Ladder. Lord, it’s noisy down there. Every third house is having something done. Anyway, Jean isn’t. She’s spent her money on a cruise. Which she is now on, according to Vonda, who lives next door.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘She could have written them all in advance, of course, and got someone else to post them. Could even have got the neighbour to do it. Our Vonda had a shifty air, if you ask me. Trying to get me off the scent with cake.’

  ‘Cake?’

  ‘Hot fresh parkin. She gave me a wedge once she’d made sure I wasn’t the mafia. And once she’d recognised me from the newspaper…’

  Rex let Lawrence chunter on, feeling that his efforts at the council had been in vain. An ocean-cruising poet sending her Delphic missives in via a third party sounded improbable. It was a dead-end. But who was sending them?

  Ellie had finished her call, but before Rex could ask for her input, she’d summoned him in.

  ‘Head Office are making an exception due to your valued contribution on the Trabzon collapse. While the suspension remains in place, you can work for us, freelance, on an agreed story-by-story basis. But you won’t get a byline. It’s all going in under my name. Or Terry’s.’

  ‘Can I choose?’

  ‘Do you want this job?’

  He chose to ignore this. ‘It goes deeper,’ he said, closing the door and sitting down. ‘There are rotten elements in the council lining their own pockets while the safety standards go to hell. That’s why Kemal Toprak died today.’

  She opened her mouth to argue, but he got in first.

  ‘Council services are being farmed out through an agency that pays slave wages, cash in hand, no questions asked. I’ve got proof of that here,’ he said, putting his phone on the desk between them. ‘But who’s to say it stops there? Someone in the council seems to be trying to warn us about it. If I can find them…’

  ‘And you can actually prove what you’re saying…’

  ‘That guy Pocock – he’s involved. I know he is. This whole complaint thing is a bluff, he thinks I’ll back off. I’ll prove he’s involved. I’ll prove all of it. And it’ll be on your watch, Ellie. All glory, honour, credit, Shining Star stickers and c.v. points going to you.’

  She smiled, not quite able to hide the hunger. Seizing the advantage, he played her the recording Helena had made. After a few seconds, she paused it, frowning.

  ‘Is it all in Greek?’

  ‘Well… yes,’ he said, kicking himself for his oversight. ‘But translated, it’ll prove what I’m saying.’

  ‘It’ll need more than that.’

  ‘I can get more than that. I can get everything. I just need a week.

  ‘A week?’

  ‘A week.’

  He didn’t know why he’d said that. He didn’t know for sure if he could prove it in a year. The point was, Ellie, at length, nodded.

  ‘A week. And you promise to go back to Maureen. You’ve stopped, haven’t you?’

  He frowned.

  ‘She rang here. Very discreet. Left a number. I looked it up. I am a journalist as well, you know.’

  He went straight out and booked another appointment for the afternoon. Given the promise he’d just made, he had a feeling he might be needing Maureen.

  He’d intended to head directly to her consulting room during the afternoon lull, but the arrival of a bill, hand-delivered, from the nuns, pricked his conscience. He had it all worked out, a new route. Quick handover of cheque at the door, back up the path to catch a 43 in Muswell Hill, which would take him round the wooded flank of the North London mountain ranges, descending through the suicide viaducts of Archway onto the Holloway Road, just in time for some gut-spilling chez Maureen.

  It worked well until the end of stage one, when Sister Florence insisted on him coming inside for a moment to see Sybille. Reluctantly, he complied, passing through the earthy warren to a sort of breakfast room he’d only seen once, on the day his wife moved in a decade before. It was sunny and bright, with a view of the tiny boating lake. Sybille was sitting in a wicker chair by the opened sliding glass doors, clearly enjoying her surroundings.

  Sister Florence fingered the olive-wood cross she wore around her neck. ‘Yesterday, just, she asks to sit. And she stays.’

  ‘It’s a nice room, Syb,’ he said.

  ‘It’s a beautiful room,’ she replied. ‘There’s a bird. It’s a… Listen!’ She held a finger aloft, cocked her head as a deep, hollow-sounding tattoo sounded outside. ‘A woodpecker!’

  Sybille had never shown any interest in nature. They’d had no garden at their flat in Camden, but she had managed to kill cut flowers and houseplants, even cacti, with great speed and skill. Now, here was his eminently metropolitan wife, in raptures over a woodpecker. But this was something real – outside the narrow tracks of the nuns’ routines and the TV crime dramas. Sybille wasn’t, as he often suspected and feared, indifferent to her surroundings. She cared.

  That made him care, too. She couldn’t go to Paris. No way would he allow it.

  ‘Maybe you could visit this room every day,’ he said.

  ‘Hmm,’ she replied, dreamily. Then she began to sing. Hoarse, off-key – as ever. It was a song he’d never heard before, from her, or anyone else.

  ‘Drobna, drabnitsa, drobna, drabnitsa

  Drobni dozhdzhik lye…’

  He looked at Sister Florence.

  ‘Peter?’

  ‘Peter,’ the little nun affirmed, guilty, eyes cast down to her stout, lace-up shoes. ‘He was here for mending yesterday the slide-door.’

  The song sounded Russian, or perhaps Polish. It continued, with words Sybille had trouble pronouncing, but tried nonetheless. Byedna basota… Di garyelki… Then she began again. He recorded it this time. He could play it to Aurelie, he thought, and prove to her that Sybille was thriving here, where she was, even if she was doing it in Slavic verse.

  ‘Rex, don’t be angry,’ the nun said, mistaking his determination for disapproval. ‘Peter is not a bad man – look!’

  Before he could reply, the song ended. But Sybille launched straight into something else. The same language, or kind of language, but not a song. Something serious, urgent.

  Bo’ya milastsi khachu a nye akhvyari, i

  bogavedanya baly’ey, chim usespalennya’u

  It sounded like an oath or a threat. Only one person coul
d tell him which.

  ‘Is he here today?’

  Sister Florence shook her head. ‘He comes. He goes.’

  ‘When he next comes, tell him I want to talk to him before he goes. I want to know what he’s saying to my wife.’

  He gave her one of his cards. Sister Florence made a face, as if the notion was ridiculous, and Peter could only be contacted through prayer.

  ‘Where’s he from?’

  ‘I think Russia. Sister Mary Sulpice says Poland. Sister Anna-Claire thinks Greek.’

  ‘Greek?’

  Sister Florence rolled her eyes. Sister Anna-Claire was known to be seized by odd notions. But then what was odder than the reality: some tramp blowing in from the woods and inducing Sybille to swap ‘Ironside’ for Slavonic choruses?

  Heading down the Archway Road on the top deck of his next bus-ride, Rex felt as if the 43 was about to sail off the edge of the world. London sat below, like a bauble in a bowl. If you lived up here, he thought, you’d feel like you’d conquered the city. Down on the marsh-plains where Rex lived, it was the reverse. The place owned you. It bred hard people, fighters, who felt they had to punch their way out.

  He tried Aurelie again. Once again, he got the husband.

  ‘I’m going to send you something. It’s a recording. Sybille singing. She’s got this new room. It’s like she’s waking up. And she doesn’t want to go. Really. She mustn’t go.’

  He stopped, aware that he’d done a lot of breathless, loosely connected rambling and the person on the other end had said nothing.

  ‘Rex. I am pleased about those changes. Really, I am. But I have to tell you now, Aurelie has booked the transportation. It is for Saturday the six April.’

  ‘Why don’t the nuns know about it, then?’

  ‘They do know. It’s why Sybille is staying in that front room in the daytime. So that they can pack up her room.’

  Between the lines was the point that Rex didn’t know much about the daily business of the convent. Because he wasn’t that involved. And yet the man wasn’t point-scoring. He spoke like a policeman, experienced at delivering bad news but still human.