Honour (13 page)

‘It was a different world back then,’ she said. ‘Nothing similar to your life here in London. You young people are so lucky.’

It wasn’t the answer I wanted to hear. No handkerchiefs embroidered with each other’s initials. No palpitations of sweet desire. There were no amorous promises whispered in the dark in my parents’ past. Love was such a remote possibility that they didn’t even pretend. My sister knew it. She was aware the three of us were here only because of duty, surrender and indifference, not because of love. That is why I was disobedient, she was rebellious, and Yunus was perceptive.

Esma and I used to talk all the time.

‘
You two chatter like a downpour,’ Mum would say. ‘Rain outside the house, rain inside!’

I must have told Esma things I had not shared with anyone else
 –
not even with the boys or with Katie. I confided in her because she always had something interesting to say. She was good with words. But also because, deep in my heart, I knew she was the only one in our family who was enough of an insider to get the picture and enough of an outsider to fall out of the picture. I liked that
 –
until the autumn of 1978. Something snapped in me then and could never be fixed again.

*

Trippy spends the rest of the afternoon dead silent. His face is the colour of days-old piss. He put on a brave show in the visitors’ room. He told his wife that he understood, that he really did, and wished her the best in life. Nema problema! He thanked her for being so supportive and generous all these years. Then he signalled to the guard that the visit was over, walked her to the door and kissed her goodbye, joking that he would miss her custard tarts.

Now he’s sitting with his back to the wall, his jaws clenched and eyes steeled. The reality has sunk in, and he thinks she’s a cold-hearted bitch who stabbed him in the back. Human nature being what it is, we hate most those we love most.

‘I’ve had enough of this,’ Trippy says, moving his hand to and fro, as if pulling out an imaginary clump of weeds.

‘It’ll pass.’

‘Bugger it. The hell it’ll pass.’

I try a different approach. ‘You always tell me there are tons of miserable people out there. Everyone’s got shit.’

Trippy pays me no attention. ‘I’m sure she has a bun in the oven,’ he says. ‘From that git.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I fucking know,’ he shouts.

He springs to his feet and paces the floor. His eyes land on the Houdini poster. For a moment, I get the impression he’s going to pull it down and rip it apart. But he doesn’t. Instead, a crestfallen look washes over his face. Then he lurches forward and, with all his might, punches the wall.

The thud is loud, deep, sickening. Suddenly I remember a moment in time. My father and I. We were on the street, quarrelling. The flare in his nostrils, the glare in his eyes
 –
or was I the angry one? Yes, I flipped my lid and rammed into the wall. I struck my head again and again. People came running, the club’s bodyguard was mad as hell.

Trippy’s next thump brings me to my senses. I try to intervene but he pushes me so hard I land on my back. Until I grab his arms and wind him down, he manages to hit the wall several more times.

‘You keep doing that and you’ll get all the screws here. You hear me?’

His knuckles are bleeding, and his breath comes out in short gasps. I hold his head between my elbows, and wait for the moment to pass.

‘You don’t need this,’ I say.

‘Like you know.’

‘I know.’

‘I need to take it out on something,’ he protests.

‘We should get you a punch bag, then.’

Trippy goes thin-lipped. I know what he’s thinking. A bag is no good. Lifeless, dull, muted. He wants to feel the flesh under his knuckles, hear the bones crack. If he were a free man tonight, he would go to a bar, drink like a fish and get into a nice, heated fight. Being a weedy bloke, they would rough him up. But that would give him something to joke about the next day. Something to focus on.

Still holding him, I tilt back my head and look him in the eyes. ‘Hit me.’

‘What?’ he asks, his voice breaking up.

‘Shhh, keep it down . . . ’ I say. ‘I’m a trained boxer. You forget?’

I watch the confusion drain out of his face. ‘You’re nuts,’ he says and laughs, but we both know that means yes.

A kind of frenzy takes hold of me. I strip off my T-shirt and toss it away. I take a deep breath and let it go. I work on my breath for a while, never holding it too long. Inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale . . .

Shoulders down, stomach out, I clench my hands and tighten up my muscles. You have to have space. Between you and the enemy, the fist and the internal organs, the individual and the society, the past and the present, the memories and the heart . . . in everything that you do or that happens to you in this life, you need space. The space will protect you. The trick in taking a hard punch is to know how to create extra space.

All the time Trippy is watching me with a raised eyebrow as he always does when confronted with something he doesn’t understand.

‘So what are you waiting for, scumbag?’ I prompt him.

The first blow comes a little unsteadily, sideways. It must have hurt him more than it hurt me. I let out a long, low whistle.

‘What?’ Trippy asks, annoyed.

‘Nothing,’ I say, allowing a smirk to cross my face.

Trippy hates people smirking at him. He just can’t help it. It makes his blood boil
.
In fact, no one in this joint is particularly fond of smirks.

My abdomen is hard from years of working out but the force of the next hit catches me off guard. I feel a sharp jab under my ribcage, which comes and goes. Trippy stops and stares at me, surprised by his own strength.

Another memory pops into my mind. I remember the day my mother took me to a hammam
in Istanbul. I must have been six or so. The steam, the heat, the echoes, naked female bodies with their legs apart, a granny and her sagging tits. Terrified, I hurried out. Mum caught me, shook me hard. ‘Where are you going?’

‘I don’t like it here.’

‘Don’t be silly. I don’t call you sultan for nothing,’ she said. ‘Behave like a sultan or I’ll call you a clown instead.’

Space. I need to have more space from her memory. It drives me insane.

I smirk again. ‘Come on, clown! I’m fillin’ my boots here!’

Trippy’s next punches are stronger, concentrated. He’s not a stocky man, but he’s no wimp. He reminds me of a hunting dog
 –
thin, lean, without an ounce of fat on its body, but stubborn, unrelenting.

We go on like this for a good while. At one point Trippy gets carried away and sends a blow that lands on my chin, but other than that he works on the same spot. Somewhere behind that muscle there is my appendix, sleeping, curled up like a worm
 –
an unnecessary organ. Although no good for anything, it still managed to kill Houdini.

In a few minutes the iron doors at the end of the corridor fall open, the lights are turned on. Somebody in a cell near by sniggers as if enjoying the commotion, and three screws come running. They storm in, thinking we’ve been fighting. Trippy puts his arm around me to prove to them that that is not the case. We are good friends. He gives a proud smirk. That does it. The smirk. As I said, nobody around here likes that.

Before we know it, there is shouting, swearing, threatening and shoving, a theatre of authority, a spectacle of power, and too much light, sharp and piercing, projected on us. Trippy and I cower like bugs caught in the kitchen at night.

‘Don’t you get it? We weren’t fighting,’ Trippy screams his head off.

‘What were you doing, then?’ says one of them. ‘Dancing?’

Trippy looks at me, momentarily confused, as if asking, ‘Yeah, what were we doing? What on earth got into us?’

*

Next morning Officer Andrew McLaughlin comes by, his vanity following him like a hungry dog. He has got used to the job but not to me. He’s read the reports of the night before and says we must have been on drugs, for no man in his right mind would start a fight just like that. On the pretext of searching for our stash, he orders his men to leave no stone unturned
 –
the books, the blankets, photos of Trippy’s children, my notebook, even the insides of our bed mats.

Trippy gnaws at the insides of his mouth to suppress a smile. We’re both thinking the same thing. We are miraculously clean. If this search had been a few days ago, they would have found a few goodies. But that’s all gone now. We have nothing to worry about.

Just when they seem to be leaving, Officer McLaughlin stops. He has something in his hand, and he asks, ‘What is this?’

It’s a postcard with a photo of a carousel in an amusement park. Wooden horses, lights in the background. There is no one in the image, only a red balloon floating away and the suggestion of an unseen force lurking about, perhaps the wind.

‘I can’t hear you!’ McLaughlin says.

Neither Trippy nor I answer. Officer McLaughlin starts to read aloud, changing his voice to a mocking imitation of a woman’s.

‘Dear brother . . . or shall I not call you that any more? What can I call you, then? Askander? Iskender? Alex? Sultan? Murderer? Do you remember the carousel Mum took us to when we first arrived in London? Wasn’t it something? Yunus wasn’t born yet and God knows where Dad was. Just you, me and Mum.

I’ll never forgive you for what you’ve done. You might rot in prison or burn in hell, but neither the Queen’s nor God’s punishment will ever wash off this sin in my eyes. In the courtroom, I’ll not support you. Whatever Uncle Tariq says, I’ll testify against you. As of today I am mourning two deaths: that of a mother, but also of a brother–

Esma

‘Your sis is cool,’ says Officer McLaughlin, putting his hand on his heart as if hurt. ‘It’s nice to see one member of your clan knows right from wrong.’

He doesn’t look at anyone when he says this but as soon as he’s done talking his eyes lock on mine. I reach out to take the postcard from him, but he swings it up in the air, playfully. ‘Tut, tut.’ He purses his mouth. ‘First you gotta answer me: why were you making Trippy hit you?’

At my silence, Officer McLaughlin shrugs and examines his fingernails. ‘All right. I’ll leave you two for now,’ he says finally. ‘I’ll take this lovely card with me, Alex. When you feel like telling the truth, you come and see me, and I’ll give it back.’

I don’t need to hold the postcard in my hand to see what it says. He doesn’t know that I’ve memorized every single word on it. Every ‘not’, every comma, every ‘Mum’.

As soon as Officer McLaughlin has gone, I sit back. My throat closes and my eyes water. Try as I might to stay still, stay sane, I’m losing it again. I slap myself. It doesn’t work. I slap again. It’s going to be a bad day, I can tell.

Iskender Toprak

London, December 1977

Since the day she was born as the seventh daughter of a woman who longed for a son, Pembe had come to see this world as a hotbed of favouritism and inequalities, some of which she accepted as unchangeable,
the ways of humans
. But never in her life had she been subjected to open hostility for being who she was. Until that day in early December 1977 – the day she met him.

There was only one client at the Crystal Scissors – the retired librarian who seemed in no hurry to be anywhere – and Pembe asked the owner, Rita, for a break to do some shopping. Yunus had been craving his favourite dessert – rice pudding with orange blossom – and she intended to surprise him that evening.

‘Rita, is okay if I go for one hour?’

Rita was not only her boss but also a dear friend. A tall black woman with a huge bosom, chipped teeth, the biggest Afro in town and a smile as sunny as the summer skies, Rita always used to talk about the place where she had come from.
Jamaica.
To Pembe’s ears, the name felt nutty and crunchy, like a roasted cashew.

‘Go, darling,’ said Rita. ‘I’ll take care of the librarian. I bet she wants to tell me all about her holiday in Italy.’

Pembe left the salon feeling light and heavy at the same time. Light, because she had a full hour all for herself. Heavy, because things had not been going well recently. Esma was always sulking, a book in her hand, going through another phase. Iskender was worse. He came home late every evening, and she was worried that he had befriended the wrong kind of people; and her husband . . . well, she didn’t want to know what exactly he had got himself into this time, disappearing for weeks on end, bringing home smells from another woman, when he did appear.

Adem was a sad man. He often talked about his childhood, mentioning the same forlorn memories again and again, unable to let go. It was like one of those snacks that you knew were harmful but you couldn’t stop munching on, even when full. Inadvertently, almost without realizing it, he would start to talk about the past. As for Pembe, trusting that time, or her prayers, would put things in their place, she carried on without an ounce of protest, reassuring herself that it was all for the best – or would some day turn out to be. To her the future was a land of promises. She had not been there yet, but she trusted it to be bright and beautiful. It was a place of infinite potential, a mosaic of shifting tiles, now in a seamless order, now in mild disarray, for ever re-creating itself.

To him the past was a shrine. Reliable, solid, unchanging and, above all, enduring. It provided insight into the beginning of everything; it gave him a sense of centre, coherence and continuity. He visited it devotedly and repeatedly, less out of need than out of a sense of duty – as if submitting to a higher will. Whereas Adem was religious about the past, Pembe was faithful about the future.

Unlike the morning’s soft sun, the early-afternoon weather had turned nippy and windy. Pembe was wearing the buttoned-up grey coat that made her look older, and also like a wartime girl who had to keep careful track of every scant penny, which, in fact, was what she was doing. She did a quick shop at Tesco, buying the ingredients she needed. Just as she was passing by the bakery around the corner, she spotted chocolate eclairs in the window. Not large, thick and filled with whipped cream but small and glossy, the way she liked them.

Though she rarely gave in to temptation, she made a beeline for the eclairs and entered the shop, the bells behind the door jingling merrily. Inside was the baker – a corpulent woman with legs covered with varicose veins and eyebrows so thin as to be almost invisible – chatting fervently with an acquaintance. Meanwhile her assistant was serving the customers. A skinny man, no older than twenty, with beady, blue eyes, inflamed cheeks that pointed to overly sensitive skin and hair cropped so short it was hard to tell its colour. His forehead was covered with spots, and his knuckles and arms had several tattoos, including a large swastika.

As there was another customer – a well-dressed elderly woman – ahead of her, Pembe had to wait. A minute later the bells jingled again, and a middle-aged man walked in, but she barely glanced at him.

The old lady was quite picky and had a tendency to change her mind every few seconds. She wanted plain scones, three, well, maybe four, but how about some Eccles cakes, no, on second thoughts, she would like the fruit scones, please. The strawberry tarts looked worth considering too, but were they fresh and the pastry crisp, she wondered, because, if so, she might like to get the tarts instead of the scones, which were a bit too everyday. And on it went.

Each time she changed her mind the assistant put the item back on to the tray where it belonged and took the next cake in demand, showed it to her and waited for her approval. When she finally made up her mind, settling on a half-dozen iced buns, they began discussing how to wrap them – was it better to put them in a paper bag, which was light and easy, but could get torn on the way, or to place them in a box, which was safer, of course, except harder to carry. Raising his head from behind the glass case, the assistant gave the waiting customers the once-over, focusing on Pembe. She didn’t notice the bitterness in the young man’s stare, but the shopper behind her did.

Finally the old lady left, moving so slowly that even the bells didn’t jingle as she opened the door. Now that it was her turn, Pembe nodded at the assistant, but he ignored her and went about organizing the pastries. Then he proceeded to arrange the metal trays, taking out the boxes, putting them back.

‘Excuse me,’ Pembe said, pointing at the chocolate eclairs. ‘May I have this . . . two, please?’

‘Wait your turn,’ the assistant muttered, wiping a pair of tongs.

Baffled more by his tone than by what he had said, Pembe hesitated for a moment. It was then that the other customer interjected, ‘It is her turn.’

It worked. Putting the tongs down, the assistant approached them, his eyes glued on Pembe. ‘So what do
you
want?’

Now Pembe had never confronted a racist before and the idea that someone could hate another person because of their skin colour, religion or class was as alien to her as snow in August. Not that complete strangers had never mistreated or belittled her, but those instances were all due to temporary flare-ups, or so they had seemed, rather than preconceived judgements over which she had no control. She was aware of how different the Topraks were from their English neighbours, and yet Turks and Kurds were different from one another too, and some Kurds were completely unlike other Kurds. Even in her tiny village by the Euphrates every family had another story, and in every family no two children were ever the same. If Allah had wanted to create human beings alike, He surely would have done so. Pembe had no idea why He had introduced so much variety into His creation, but she trusted His intentions. Accepting people the way they were born was tantamount to respecting the divine scheme.

The truth was, she was quite tolerant when it came to inborn differences. What she couldn’t adjust to were the variations introduced afterwards. A punk with hair as spiky as a hedgehog, a teenager with his eyebrows pierced, a singer with tattoos all over his body or Esma’s passion for wearing trousers and braces – these were the things she found hard to digest. Her linear logic put her in a quandary at times. When she met a homosexual person, for instance, she wanted to understand if he had been born that way or had turned that way over time. If it was God’s doing, it was okay; if it was that person’s doing, she didn’t approve of it. But since, in the end, everything was God’s work and His alone, she could not nurse disparaging sentiments against anyone for too long.

So when the assistant asked her what she wanted, Pembe heard the question but not the tone of scorn underneath it. Duly, dutifully, she answered, ‘I want this one and that one, please.’

The assistant stared off into the distance beyond and above her head, as if she were invisible to him. ‘Don’t they have names?’ he asked.

Thinking that the man had not understood her, Pembe approached the pastry trays from the side and pointed again at the eclairs without realizing that the hem of her coat was brushing against the cinnamon rolls.

‘Hey, don’t touch those,’ the assistant yelled. He picked up one of the rolls and inspected it. ‘Nah, I can’t sell these any more.’

‘What?’

‘Do you see this bit of fluff?’ he grumbled. ‘It’s from your coat. You have to buy the whole tray now.’

‘Fluff?’ Pembe pouted her lips as if the unfamiliar word had left a sour taste in her mouth. ‘No, no. I don’t want the tray.’ In her confusion she flipped her hands upwards, and one of her shopping bags knocked over a basket with rock cakes, sending them on to the floor.

The assistant shook his head. ‘Whoa, you’re a walking catastrophe.’

By now the commotion had drawn the owner’s attention and she clomped towards them to see what was going on.

‘This woman here ruined the rolls and spilled the cakes. I told her she has to buy them, but she doesn’t get it.’

Pembe’s cheeks turned red under the scrutiny of the owner.

‘I don’t think she even speaks English,’ added the assistant.

‘I speak,’ Pembe snapped.

‘Then surely you must have understood what you were told,’ said the owner speaking slowly, and unnecessarily loudly, as if Pembe were deaf.

‘But he says buy all tray. I don’t have much money.’

Folding his arms across his chest, the assistant remarked, ‘Then we’ll have to ring the police.’

‘No police, why?’ Pembe was beginning to panic.

‘Ahem.’ The customer standing behind coughed theatrically. Now all heads turned towards him, the silent onlooker. ‘I’ve been observing your eclair crisis,’ he said. ‘And I feel obliged to say a few words. If the law becomes involved, I’ll be the sole witness here.’

‘So?’ said the assistant.

‘So I’ll tell them the other side of the story.’

‘What other side?’

‘That you’ve mistreated your customer and you haven’t served her properly. You were slow, impolite, uncooperative, difficult, even aggressive.’

‘Now, now, gentlemen,’ said the owner, a placatory smile hovering over her lips, as she realized the situation was getting out of control. ‘Let’s not make a mountain out of a molehill. There’s no harm done. No need to go to the police.’

Quietly, as if through water, Pembe turned towards the other customer, seeing him, really seeing him, for the first time. He was wearing a sepia corduroy jacket with leather elbow patches over a beige turtleneck sweater. He had a long face, a prominent nose and light brown hair that had a golden tint in the light and was receding at the sides. His eyes were kind, though a bit tired; they were the colour of stormy weather, grey and intense behind a pair of glasses that made him look like a university professor – or so she thought.

The assistant, too, was inspecting him, albeit resentfully. He hissed, ‘Well, how can I help you, then?’

‘First the lady,’ the customer said. ‘You haven’t helped her yet.’

*

They left the bakery together – strangers united by happenstance. It seemed natural that they should walk together for a few minutes, reliving the experience, renewing their camaraderie. He insisted on carrying her bags, and that, too, seemed all right, though she would have never allowed it had they been in her neighbourhood.

They walked until they reached the nearby playground, which was empty, perhaps because of the blustery weather. By now the wind was so strong that here and there the leaves came whipping down as if caught in a whirlpool. However, for the first time since she had arrived in England, Pembe thought there was something enchanting about the weather – beyond the wind and the rain and the clouds, there loomed a kind of serenity she had got used to and come to love without realizing it. She grew pensive.

He was watching her out of the corner of his eye, noting how her face was free of cosmetics, and her hair, which had blown free of its headscarf, was the colour of autumn, bright chestnut with reddish streaks that were so subtle even she might not be aware of their presence. He found her full lips and single dimple very attractive but kept his thoughts to himself. Nature’s lottery was bizarre. This woman, if she were to dress differently and carry herself differently, would turn many heads on the street. Yet perhaps it was better that her beauty was half concealed.

‘That boy was mad,’ Pembe said, still thinking about what had transpired in the pastry shop.

‘He was not mad,’ the man objected. ‘He was a racist.’

She paused, taken aback.
Racists were people who didn’t like the blacks – those who were against Rita.
‘I’m not black,’ she said.

He laughed at the joke. And when he realized she wasn’t joking, he stared at her in wonder. ‘You don’t have to be black for a racist to take against you. There are many kinds of racism, though they’re all the same, if you ask me.’

She listened, trying to wade through his accent, which was quite different from anything she had heard since she arrived.

‘There are whites who hate blacks,’ he went on helpfully. ‘Then there are whites who hate browns. To make matters more complicated some blacks hate browns and some browns hate blacks, not to mention those self-hating blacks, browns and whites, and the blacks, browns and whites who basically hate everybody. Then there’s religion, of course, the big divide. Some Muslims hate all Jews and some Jews hate all Muslims. Oh, and there are some Christians who hate them all.’

‘But why hate?’ she asked.

More than the question, it was the way in which it was asked, the sheer simplicity and innocence of it, almost childlike, that startled him. She was completely earnest, he noticed. Rising unemployment, poverty, xenophobia, ideological clashes, the oil crisis . . . At that moment none of these was a sufficient answer to a question so plain and basic. And he, a veteran sceptic, a dedicated disbeliever, an all-time pessimist, a man who didn’t trust the news or the newspapers and took everything with a pinch of salt, including his own truths, and harboured no hopes about humanity’s future, repeated, as if through a distant echo, ‘Mmmm, that’s so true. But why hate?’