The Missing Person's Guide to Love (12 page)

Because everyone was changing. They were altering in shape and swapping faces. While she had been sitting at the table, standing by the window, as the sky outside had shrugged off its colour and the dog-walkers had come and gone, everyone had moved to another place. It was like musical chairs and - just as she had intended - one person was standing, out of the game.

On the day I told Mete about the funeral we had found drops of blood on the front doorstep of our shop, little cherries in the dust. We didn’t know whether we should call the police but there was no damage to the shop or the street. There had been a couple of attacks on properties in the area in the previous weeks, minor burglaries and vandalism, but this did not appear to be an attack on us. It seemed to have nothing to do with us: someone had borrowed our step to bleed on, then walked away. In the end Mete had mopped up the blood and we looked out at the clean pavement all morning, wondering whose it had been and how it had come to spatter across our step.

I once thought I would be a dancer but I don’t dance now, and Mete is a pilot who doesn’t fly. I let my body grow lazy until I found I was so unfit that I was quite a bad dancer. My posture has slipped a little and I get breathless when I run upstairs. I’m thin but not skinny any more and my muscle tone is not as good as it was. But in the years that I was pirouetting
and doing the splits, Mete was flying fighter jets from Izmir to Diyarbakir and Ankara. He was sleeping in the forests of eastern Turkey, parachuting into the Mediterranean and the Aegean and swimming miles to the shore. After an injury that damaged his eyesight and left him with a bad back, we married so that he could leave the air force. For now, he is running his uncle’s shop. He will always be a pilot, whether or not he flies. He is always thinking about the sky, is always moving through it, and dreams of getting a commercial pilot’s licence one day. It’s a question of waiting, of saving money, of deciding what to do next. The grocery is borrowed from his aunt and uncle and it is temporary. We are just caretakers.

In the afternoon I took Elif to the outdoor market a few streets away. She likes to walk among the stalls, call hello –
merhaba
– to the headscarved women weighing carrier-bags full of vegetables, haggling and offering samples of fruit, cheese, fresh nuts. She stands on tiptoe to peer into barrels of green and black olives. Her favourite things are the shiny aubergines, round like pumpkins, which she knows by the Turkish name,
patlican
. She reaches to touch them, stroking and patting the purple skin.

We stopped at the last stall in the row. The table was heavy with plastic bowls holding chunks of soft white sheep’s cheese. A pair of middle-aged women cut small slivers for customers to try and waited with narrowed eyes and pursed lips for their response. I bought half a kilo of the kind I always buy, the one they say is best for breakfast, and waited as one of the women wrapped the damp cheese in plastic and brown paper. We left.
Elif trotted beside me to the edge of the market picking up fallen leaves – she said she was tidying up – and occasionally bumping into the legs of other customers.

I dropped Elif off at Mete’s aunt’s apartment for the evening and decided to call in at the Internet café to check my emails before meeting Mete. There was just one and it was from Maggie. The title of her message was a cheerful ‘Hello there!!’ so I was not prepared for its content.

Tragically, Isabel, Sheila’s son Owen was killed in an accident on Wednesday. Were you still in touch with him?

There were details about the funeral, then some scraps of news about Maggie’s life. I shut down the computer and set off to find Mete at the shop.

The sky was darkening and the call to prayer snaked into the air from four or five nearby mosques. Half of the street had been dug up and was turning to mud. I was not allowing myself to think about Owen yet. The information was in my head but I’d pushed it to the back.

I fixed my eyes on the muddy road ahead as the calls came from passing men.
Where are you going, lady? Hello, hello. How are you?
I have developed a way of walking that keeps the catcalls at bay. I keep my head down, wear an expression of aloofness, and move with a quick stride that shows I know exactly where I am going. It says that I’m not a tourist and I don’t have time to talk. When I’m with Elif, they don’t do it so I can relax and slow down, let my eyes wander about the street.
But then I find myself alone again and my guard is down so it is worse than ever.

It was beginning to rain so I had an excuse to pull up the hood of my long coat and become invisible. In this little dark space I was finally able to think about Maggie’s email. I felt sick and cold. My feet dragged over the bumpy pavement and, once or twice, I almost tripped. Then tears were slipping down my face and my skin felt hot. I didn’t know whether I was crying for Owen exactly. Perhaps I was, but I’d convinced myself a few years ago that he was responsible for Julia’s death so maybe I was crying because now I could never find out.

A television or radio blared from a window and a couple of women shouted across the street at each other from their balconies
Asiye Hanim . . .

Efendim . . .

Asiye Hanim . . .

Evet. Efendim?

Asiye, are you there? . . .

Yes . . .

Asiye? . . .

Yes, what is it?

I turned the corner at the
börek
shop, breathed the oily smell of pastry and stepped into the small back-street towards the light of our own place.

Mete was in front of it, laughing with an elderly woman. She gave him some money and walked away, still calling her good wishes to him. She disappeared into an alleyway leaving only Mete and me on the dark street. I could tell from the way
he surveyed the pavement after the woman had gone that he was still thinking about the blood. He didn’t notice me coming towards him and jumped when he saw me. ‘Allah. You surprised me.’

I am afraid of the dark and I seem to make other people nervous of it too. ‘Sorry.’ I put my arm round his waist, tucked my hand under his denim jacket and rested it on the slight band of fat around his waist. ‘I’ve come to help, if you need me.’

Riza, Mete’s cousin, was on a ladder at the back of the shop. I waved to him. Mete and Riza look like brothers. They are both tall with round brown eyes, wide, friendly smiles, long eyelashes. They are in their thirties but look about twenty-five. Riza’s black hair is cut short, almost military in style. Since Mete left the air force he wears his hair longer, lets it curl into the back of his neck. Every few weeks he plucks a white one from the mass of black, holds it up to the bedroom lamp, and shakes his head.

Riza called to me through his cigarette. ‘Come in and get dry for a bit. Mete’s taking you for dinner tonight.’

‘Are you?’ I pulled down my hood and went inside. Riza chucked me an orange from a box on a shelf. ‘Good.’ I cupped it in my hands.

‘Yes. Do you want to? My back hurts and I don’t have the energy to stand up any longer. Riza can manage for the rest of the evening. It’s been quiet.’

‘And my uncle and his brother are coming over soon.’ Riza slid down the ladder and sat on the bottom rung. ‘So we’ll close up and take care of everything.’

Mete lifted a sack of rice into the shop and winced.

I rubbed his lower back. ‘Here? Is that better?’

‘Yes, just there. Perfect.’

‘Come on, then. What shall we have?’

‘Hey, have you been crying?’

‘Oh, but it’s all right. I’ll explain when we sit down some?where.’

‘So let’s go and cheer up. Somewhere nice in town, like Çiçek Pasaji? Or would you prefer the pide place round the corner?’

‘The one behind the mosque with the hat man? Yeah, let’s go there.’

The hat man is young and stands outside the pide house every evening selling navy woollen hats. Next to him an old man sits at a small table selling tickets for the Milli Piyango, the national lottery. The Milli Piyango man always has a small crowd of people around him, but the hat man never seems to sell a single hat. Even when it is snowing, he stands there with a hat on his head, another on his right hand, and a pile at his feet.

I took Mete’s hand. As we walked along the main road, stepping around heaps of light brown mud, I looked down at our legs, two pairs of jeans taking steps in perfect time. Mete’s legs were several centimetres longer than mine, slightly fatter. Our march was quiet, rhythmic. I moved my hand up and down his back, slowly making circles and letting my fingers find the flex of his muscles as he walked. Owen was in my head, sliding from one side to the other as I moved. This was my world, here with Mete in Istanbul, but I was slipping out of it.
Perhaps I should return to my hometown. Perhaps I should stay here.

The hat man leaned against the wall of the restaurant. He spun a hat on the tips of his fingers. When he saw us, he came forward and offered us two hats for the price of one but we declined. The Milli Piyango man sat at his small wooden table, licking his fingers and arranging lottery tickets. We passed them both and went inside.

The restaurant was long and narrow with eight or ten white-clothed tables. The brick walls were whitewashed and covered with photographs of Istanbul. Behind the counter there was a large photograph of Atatiirk. Our favourite table was at the back, near the kitchen, where it was warmest. Two or three waiters greeted us. One stepped forward to pull back our chairs. ‘Good evening. Welcome.’

‘Evening, my friend.’ Mete beamed at him.

The waiter splashed lemon-scented cologne over our hands. We rubbed our palms together and ordered
pide
, mine with eggs and cheese, Mete’s with beef, and
ayran
to drink. When the waiter left us, Mete pulled something from my hair and laughed. ‘Is this why you were upset? Did you fall out of a tree?’

He held out a small yellow leaf.

‘Ah, that belongs to Elif. We must save it for her collection. I don’t know what they’re for but she chooses them very care?fully.’

‘Then I’ll put it here.’ Mete took his wallet from his pocket and slipped the leaf into the plastic pocket where he keeps

photographs of Elif and me. ‘But what’s wrong, Isabel-Misabel?
Ne oldu?
’ What happened?

‘I went to the Internet café earlier to check my emails.’

‘Was there a message from Bernadette?’ Mete asked. ‘I wonder if she got to Greece safely.’

Bernadette had left late the night before. I’d taken her on the bus to the airport.

‘Nothing yet. She should be flitting around between islands by now. She’ll be taking photographs probably.’

‘Did she like Turkey?’ Mete was anxious that his country had made a good impression on my friend from home. ‘What did she think of Istanbul? Did you take her on the boat trip? I forgot to ask.’

‘I did. And she loved all of it. I think she was sorry to leave. She was nervous of travelling by herself. There was someone with her on the flight, a friend who was visiting Turkey too, but she’s on her own now.’

‘If she was fine in Istanbul she should be fine anywhere. This is such a difficult city. I mean, I love it but, hey, it’s Istanbul.’

‘Did I tell you she used to be an opera singer?’

‘Bernadette told me. I heard her singing in the morning when you went out to get the bread.’

‘That’s a good sign. I never once heard her sing when I was living with her. She refused to admit she could sing at all. She was in a pretty bad way. In those days she could never have travelled abroad. It was hard for her to get to the end of the street and back.’

‘She was singing very quietly but she didn’t seem to mind that I’d heard her.’

‘I’m glad.’

‘But one and a half days in Istanbul isn’t enough. We’ll have to persuade her to come back again for longer. I hardly had a chance to talk to her. Sey, Isabel, it’s good for you to have friends from home here. Why don’t you have more visitors from London?’

‘It’s a long way for people to come. And I’m not in touch with many people now. I suppose I could invite Maggie to visit us soon. She’d like to spend time with Elif.’

‘Yes, that’s a good idea. You should call her “aunt”. It’s more respectful.’

I laughed. ‘I can’t, not to her face. She’d hate it.’

‘I don’t know if I could live outside Turkey. I think I would die if I was away from home for long. If I didn’t die, my parents would die.’

‘Why would they die?’

‘I just know they would. They have to see me often and talk to me every day. It’s the way we are in Turkey.’

Mete’s parents live far away in Izmir. He doesn’t see them often but he calls at least once every day. We have to stop at telephone kiosks when we are out so that he can stop to say hello and tell them he loves them.

‘But, Mete, I was going to tell you something else. I had some bad news in an email from Maggie. Someone has died.’

Mete stared at me. I had frightened both of us.

‘Who?’

‘It’s all right.’ I put my hand over his. ‘I mean, it’s not all right but it wasn’t someone very close to me. A friend from years ago. I was at school with him. It was a car accident, apparently. I want to go to the funeral.’

‘Yes, yes, of course. You must. And I’ll come with you.’

‘Oh, Mete. You don’t need to.’

‘It’s all right. I don’t mind.’

Mete could not come with me. Mete wasn’t a part of my earlier life and I loved him for this. ‘We can’t afford it, can we?’ I said, and it was true. ‘Not for Elif to come too.’

‘It would be expensive. I don’t know how we would find the money.’

We locked our feet together under the table and I watched the waiters come and go through the kitchen door as Mete turned his eyes to the street. Our food arrived and we didn’t speak for a while. I picked up the long strips of warm bread with melted cheese and chewed them slowly. I liked the feeling of Mete’s feet around mine and I squeezed them tighter.

‘Mete, I think I should go to the funeral, even if I go alone.’

‘Do you really want to? You said he wasn’t a close friend.’