Black Day at the Bosphorus Café

by M. H. Baylis

  Her voice died away, as if something too heavy was blocking it. He wanted to say something. He didn’t get the chance.

  ‘Rex? I thought it was you!’

  He glanced up. His heart thudded. Browner and thinner than before, and sporting the sort of awful trousers that young girls buy on their gap years in far-off climes, was a woman he’d last walked away from, cursing, in a beer garden in South East Asia. It was Diana Berne, his former GP, former… what? He wondered for a second, ridiculously, if Maureen could be behind this.

  ‘You look well, Rex.’ Diana’s eyes darted from him to his companion. ‘And jeans? I didn’t know you owned a pair of jeans.’

  Maureen had called her a girlfriend. But what had it actually been? A couple of dates; an interrupted shag; a tearful break-up as she’d departed to work in a Cambodian hospital; a joyous, filmic reunion, as he’d flown out to visit her among the coconut palms. Then what? Boat trips, close tuk-tuk rides, shared looks, brushed limbs, clear promises, the betrayal of discovering another man in the wings. All without a relationship in the middle.

  He rose from his stool and kissed Diana clumsily, forgetting which side to go, his lips making an unfortunate smack on her soft cheek. ‘How long are you back?’

  She sat on the spare stool, revealing further ill-advised purchases in the exotic jewellery department: a bracelet of coconut shell. Rex sensed, rather than saw, a bristling of feathers from Helena.

  ‘A couple of days.’

  ‘Long way for a couple of days.’

  Diana frowned. ‘Sorry. I’ve spent so long surrounded by weird Norwegian doctors I don’t speak proper English anymore. I mean I’ve been back a couple of days. I’m staying. I’m doing some locumming at the surgery for Dr Shah while he’s in Lahore and then – well, who knows?’

  She smiled, and he smiled back rather more broadly than he’d meant to. Catching Helena’s eye, or again, perhaps only feeling it, he introduced the two women to one another and they greeted one another in a certain bright, tight way. Then there was a pause, while everyone took big sips of their drinks, and everyone, in their own, separate ways, took stock of the same truth.

  In Rex’s case, it was truth spoken in the chirpy, toothy, Harrogate tones of Maureen – a Maureen vindicated. He hadn’t merely gone from one doctor to another. They weren’t simply named after matching goddesses. Mother of God, they even looked alike.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Thursday was a traditional heads-down day – the day they went to print. Like a weekly version of Christmas Eve, with its own special scents and baubles and songs: the wassail of the battered keyboard, the mid-time baklava box, the gift of coming in an hour later on Friday morning and diving into the deep, crisp and even snow-plains of a new edition. Rex hated weekends; he loved the ends of the week.

  He was liking this one slightly less, because he’d drunk too much the night before. It wasn’t the physical hangover – he lived his life with them – but the spiritual one, a result of having been annoyed when Helena abruptly declared her preference for an early end to the night, alone.

  As he tried to keep pace with her up a windy Green Lanes to the 144 bus stop, Rex had rashly suggested this move had something to do with Dr Diana Berne. Helena, inscrutable as the Sphinx, had stood listening to Rex’s accusation with curls blowing about her face, then denied even noticing ‘that fat girl with the trousers’ and hailed a passing black cab. Later, there came a text. What a silly reaction. (Hers, or his, he wondered.) I have to go to Cambridge all day tomorrow. I’ll call when I am back.

  He noted the absence of x’s, endearments, or even a name. Helena was cross. Cross, he thought, because she had been jealous, had sensed some bat-squeak of a history between the other two people at the table, and worst of all, had had this jealousy pointed out to her. Women didn’t mind you knowing what they were up to. They minded you telling them you knew.

  He tried, and for the most part, succeeded in keeping it out of his mind as he got on with readying the paper for the final lock-down. But text messages had always bothered him. People complained that they were an incomplete method of communicating, too easily misread. He thought the opposite: they gave everything away.

  He’d thought that, ever since a November night thirteen years ago, just before the accident, when his wife had been away at a conference, and she’d sent him a text. Wot u up to? Xxx. 16 characters, including spaces. Almost every one indicating that she had intended this message for someone else.

  Sybille never wrote ‘wot’, never used ‘u’. Neither was ‘up to’ a term that had ever graced their walls. And although Sybille did use three x’s as a sign-off, the convent-schooled lawyer in her pedantically, unfailingly, insisted they all be lower-case.

  He’d meant to raise it with her, but then he’d had a weird, embarrassing night during which his sister-in-law had drunkenly got into his bed and so, instead of being aired in a sensible, adult fashion upon his wife’s return, the text had added to the bootful of doubts and resentments which the pair had jointly driven, at speed, into a central London wall a couple of weeks later. Destroying everything. Although it turned out the shocks were not to stop there.

  After lunch – lamb-shin stew in a clattering room of hip, successful young Turks – he returned to the office to note the tang of Lawrence Berne’s aftershave on the stairs. The Laureate of the Ladders always showed his face on deadline-day, principally to hold things up with tiny, niggling queries, and make legions of irrelevant changes to his own pieces, right up to the eleventh hour, so that the whole layout ended up off-cock.

  Today, though, Lawrence had other business: a new missive from the lavender whistle-blower, this time hand-delivered. Brenda hadn’t seen the deliverer: she’d been ‘attending to something’.

  ‘See, that’s another reason we need CCTV in the foyer,’ Terry said. ‘Brenda spends hours on the cludgie.’

  Brenda left the room in protest. No one paid this much attention, though; they were too busy watching as Lawrence opened the purple envelope.

  Morecambe to Clapton

  Andaman Port

  He thought

  He could stay un-caught

  ‘Port Blair,’ said Lawrence, veteran of the Finchley and Barnet Pub Quiz League. ‘Administrative capital of the Andaman Islands.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  Lawrence shrugged.

  ‘They’re all on the coast then,’ Terry mused. ‘Andamans. Morecambe. Clapton. Oh no, that’s Clacton…’

  Rex picked up the envelope. Ellie, used to the more psychotic deadline atmosphere on the nationals, was getting itchy.

  ‘Can we do the mystery letter trail in the pub later, guys? Rex – I’ve had an email from Police Press Liaison. Some old bird with Alzheimer’s has wandered off from her home on Morley Ave. I know you’re under the cosh, but she’s 90, and it’s going to rain like fuck tonight. Can you get something on the website asap?’

  ‘Sure,’ he said. But he didn’t get on with it. He was sniffing the purple envelope as he headed down to the Reception area, where Brenda was enthroned in queenly indignation with Take-a-Break magazine and a tin of her home-made lemon thins.

  ‘Brenda–’ He handed over the envelope. ‘What does this smell of to you? I mean, apart from the lavender?’

  She took it and sniffed it. ‘Allspice,’ she said.

  ‘That 1970s aftershave?’

  ‘Not Old Spice. Allspice. I use it in gingerbread, things like that. It’s a kind of Jamaican pepper, I think…’ She pointed to her immaculate counter, where a packet of antiseptic wipes lay open. ‘If anybody had been listening up there, I would have told them there was flour on my counter, too.’

  Lawrence clipped down the stairs in his tasselled shoes. ‘Are you coming back up? Ellie’s going doo-dah up there.’

  ‘I think I’ve worked out who our letter-writer is,’ Rex said, heading up the stairs. ‘But it’s going to have to wait. By the way,’ he added, on the threshold of the office. ‘I bumped into your n
iece last night.’

  Lawrence rubbed the back of his neck, looking uncomfortable. ‘Yes, she’s er gone back to the surgery, moved right back in to her flat… Trying to move on.’

  ‘Move on from what?’

  A look of alarm flashed over the top of Lawrence’s gold-rimmed, half-moon spectacles, their owner having obviously said too much. ‘Not my business to say,’ he blustered, and fled back to his desk.

  Rex added this vague news about Diana to the list of things he had to put out of his mind, and got back to work. The day turned out to be a long one: gremlins on the website, gremlins with some new update to the layout software, the promise of a quote from the investigations team who’d been picking over the Trabzonspor site all day, but who’d then buggered off back to Welwyn Garden City without remembering. The day wound up so late, in the end, that after lock-off no one had the energy for the pub, so Rex drifted homewards, alone, just after nine thirty.

  At the crossroads, ancient as all the city’s crossroads were, he felt a primal tug toward the pubs where everyone else seemed bound. There were nights, now, when he felt as if he didn’t belong out, like a salmon, stuck on a rock while the rest of the species headed off to spawn. Many of the pubs Rex loved best had gone earnest in the recent boom: brewing their own ales, which came with tasting notes and a six quid price tag. And filled with kids, all pierced and inked up to their eyeballs, who were peaceable but looked askance at the man who was not young, yet not quite fully old and still there, among them. Sometimes, Rex just wanted to be at home on the sofa with a cold Okocim. And that troubled him. He’d always felt he belonged on the streets, on the top deck of the buses and in the bars, watching, asking, writing it all down. And now? Susan had talked about his ‘nesting’. But didn’t nesting involve pairs, pairs of creatures producing many more? Maybe this was closer to what followed when an animal crept off to be alone. It died.

  Upon his return, he found to his sorrow that the four black cans of Okocim he’d pictured chilling in the fridge had all been emptied the night before. It was raining heavily now, as all the reports had predicted, so he took the hoover out of the cupboard to fill the time until the shower stopped.

  It was an old hoover, a remnant of his marriage, and it gave off an acrid, burning smell, growing stronger the longer it was used. Thoughts of Mina came up again – Mina on fire, the petrol smell in the doorway. He realised he’d never truly stopped remembering it all, however busy he was, however much he focussed on other things. She was still with him. And the rest of it. The doorway she’d gone through – left open by the slipshod maintenance crew. The agency farming out the jobs. The officials pouring their bakshish into the poker machines. Where did it stop? And could he really hope to stop it? He had to try. And he would. Tomorrow. Thanks to today’s letter, he knew where to start.

  He kept glancing at his phone, resting on an arm of the sofa, as he hoovered around the sitting room. There’d been no message from Helena all day, and he hadn’t sent anything to her. He had a sense that he wouldn’t hear from her now until Friday, when they would pick up where they’d left off, point made, his sentence served.

  He couldn’t help looking, though. And not just because of Helena. He had Diana’s home number still. Before she left, she’d said something about a free-floating, arty friend being happy to sit the place and pay the bills while she was gone. He wouldn’t mind betting the phone number had stayed the same. And he wouldn’t mind finding out what had happened. Why Diana was back.

  It felt wrong. It felt misguided. He did it anyway. ‘It’s me,’ he said, when she answered.

  ‘Hello you,’ she said. It was that easy, he thought. She sounded happy, slightly drunk. There was soft music in the background. Or was it the boyfriend? What was his name – the Norwegian, Harley-riding, baby-saving doctor in the cut-off denims? Kjell.

  ‘Are you having a party?’

  ‘No. Annie, the girl who’s been living in the flat, she painted my kitchen orange! So we’re painting it un-orange again. With the aid of a box of wine.’

  The pronoun hadn’t gone unnoticed. ‘We?’

  ‘Annie and me! She’s still here.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘But she’s about to go to some actors’ party in Tufnell Park. Without me, of course.’

  He was in the hallway, buttoning up his coat when he realised he hadn’t put the hoover away. Did it matter? The only thing that mattered was the quickest way to her flat in Archway, a rather thornier question since they’d shut down the bus station.

  He had one hand on the door-handle, one hand on his phone when, from the other side of the frame, there came an assault of hard knocks. He jumped in shock, dropping the phone. The battery fell out.

  ‘Who is it?’

  More knocks. He put the chain back on and opened the door a crack.

  ‘Do you like champagne? At Trinity Hall they’ve got their own label!’

  She had a bottle in each hand, a long, green scarf thrown fetchingly round her neck, earrings glinting in the lamplights of a Wood Green night, like some goddess of high-end booze.

  She frowned. ‘Are you going somewhere?’

  ‘I just got back,’ Rex said, letting Helena Georgiou in, loathing how easy it was to lie.

  * * *

  ‘Let me get this straight, man. You feel like a twat for cheating. But you didn’t shag Diana. And you didn’t do the honours with Helena either?’

  Rex sighed as Terry drove them south, in his ancient Chevette, down through the rainy, carbon monoxide circus of Shopping City. Terry had a way of summing things up.

  ‘I did. I mean – I have. We have… But not last night. She came over – she seemed a bit – I don’t know, manic. She had these two bottles of odd-tasting champagne and she just seemed to want to get shit-faced. So I obliged, naturally. Then she fell asleep. This morning she had a terrible hangover. So she’s still in my bed. Sleeping it off before she goes up to Glasgow.’

  ‘So Helena’s going to be out of the picture for a few days now,’ Terry said, meaningfully.

  ‘Terry, I don’t want this. I don’t enjoy it. I sent Diana this shitty little text saying “sorry, something’s cropped up at work”. And I hated myself, because I…’

  ‘Because you’re a one-bird bloke,’ Terry pronounced expertly.

  ‘Or maybe a no-bird bloke. Or – I don’t know. Seeing Diana again just made me…’ He sighed.

  ‘What fookin’ pod did ye come outa?’ Terry exclaimed quietly, watching in a kind of angry wonder as a pair of young hipsters in skinny jeans and rabbi-beards pecked across the road in front of them. Like many immigrants, Terry didn’t approve of the people who’d come in after him. He turned his attention back to Rex.

  ‘You want my opinion, bonny lad – that doctor’s a nightmare.’

  ‘Which doctor?’

  ‘The old one. Diana. Starts getting it together with you then fucks off to Shangri-la to save lepers. Right? She tells you to come see her, so you fly out there – just been fucking stabbed, hadn’t you? So you still go out there, ten thousand miles, whatever, she spends a week cock-teasing in the back of a fucking rickshaw then up pops the boyfriend an she goes, ‘Ooh can’t we all be friends?’ Y’knaa? Now she’s back, on her tod, sees you with a fit bird and thinks I’m going to bollocks that up for him. Again. Whatever she’s prescribing, man, it’s poison.’

  ‘Wow.’ It was touching, in a way, that Terry felt so protective towards him. Unsettling, on the other hand, that he had such a dim view of Diana. Rex wasn’t even sure they’d ever met.

  ‘Now Helena… Well, you know what I think about her,’ Terry said, making vague, curving gestures with his left hand, an aerial tribute to womanhood. ‘I want to kick your shins, man, but I’m delighted for you. Seriously. She’s class.’

  ‘She lives in Nicosia.’

  ‘Good for holidays. And hummus. It is hummus, there, isn’t it?’

  ‘But I want…’ He stopped. Terry wasn’t thick, though. The Geordie shook h
is head and laughed.

  ‘You want to settle down? Is that what all this… doing up your house is all about – so you can stick a missus in there, and have dinner parties and spend Saturdays at IKEA having a barney about the pelmets? You?’

  Rex said nothing. Terry looked at him.

  ‘Hey, sorry – I wasn’t saying, like, you couldn’t have all that, if you wanted it, like, just… It doesn’t…’

  Rex let him off the hook. ‘Doesn’t sound like me. It isn’t. I’m all over the place, you know.’ He sighed, finally owning up to his feelings. ‘Ever since Mina. I’ve been trying to forget about it. About her and… the whole thing. But it’s still there. I walk past the caff every day and it doesn’t go away, any of it. What she was like then. What she was like on that last… when we saw her on the floor. You can’t see things like that and not be… not be affected, can you?’

  Terry trawled hard for a response and finally shrugged. Rex laughed.

  ‘Unless you’re made out of stotty cake and Newcastle Brown.’

  ‘Never touched broon in me life, man,’ Terry said, as he swung right onto Falkland Road, one of the higher rungs of the famous Haringey Ladder. Rex thanked him for the lift, and got out, checking the number Lawrence had given him. Vonda Paul lived in a neat terrace with hanging baskets and a fake wishing well in the front garden. The knocker was shaped like a little hand. Lawrence had been right – everyone was building. In a year’s time, Cap Ferrat would be crammed with retired scaffolders.

  A door opened, but it was the one next door. A stout Jamaican grandma stood on her step, a floral apron over a velour tracksuit.

  ‘She’s away. On a cruise.’

  ‘And is that what you both say, when someone knocks at your neighbour’s door?’

  Jeanette Crosby, for it was she, cast an eye over him, seemed to find some traces of respectability there, and nodded. Assorted, yeasty, toasty smells came from behind her.