Who am I writing for? This is what she later recalled asking herself. Though she knew the answer: she was writing for the seasoned and urbane woman she hoped to become. In truth it was even worse than that. Even more twisted and duplicitous. She was putting down the story of her first fortnight in Istanbul as she wanted to remember it. As she wished she had lived it. As she would pretend she had, forever more.
Looking up from her narrow desk to gaze at her lying reflection in the window, set against the iron grilles, she examined The Nose, and then The Left Nostril: it had grown. She shut her notebook, which stared back at her importantly. As if to say, a notebook of my calibre – or have you forgotten I am made of the finest leather? – should be treated with respect. She was ready to surrender to its superior wisdom – give up, go downstairs, call a friend, perhaps, or watch television – but of course, she couldn’t; she was not in Northampton but half a world away, locked away in a tower, with only her faltering imagination to keep her company – or that’s how it felt in the dark of night, when all she could hear was the trembling of a passing ship and the howls of the dogs in the hills.
A noise downstairs. A cross between a screech and a crash. A chair. He must have knocked it over. Her chest tightened, as she listened to her father swear. And now a hard, sharp knock, which took her longer to decipher – her father hitting the ice tray against the counter? Then silence, and footsteps, stopping at the foot of the stairs. She held her breath, but then there was the creak of the door into the library. She let herself exhale.
She opened to the first page: ‘The Journal of Jeannie Wakefield On Her First Venture into the Near East, June 1970 –.’ Such poppycock! Such pretension! You’d think, from her verbiage, that she’d already come and gone. But she’d only been here for a fortnight, and already she wanted to leave. If she were to write the truth, it would go like this:
‘It was my idea to come here – my idea, even if it’s true what Mother said, even if it was Father who planted it and fed it with every postcard he ever sent me. It was my idea, and I had to fight long and hard to make it happen. But now here I am, standing at the end of the longest limb in the world, in a house that smells like oatmeal. And last night…’
But she couldn’t bear to think of last night. Her heart churned at the very prospect. She opened the notebook, returned to her task, and as she described the great monuments she’d visited since her arrival, and the splendid vistas on which her eyes had feasted, she was again grateful for the calm and the courage this pretence brought her.
Soon she had mentioned every mosque, cistern and bridge. Rereading her account so far, she saw it for what it was – a droning catalogue of inanimate objects. She rushed to correct the oversight:
‘But enough about us. My next task is to give some sense of the city as a living, breathing entity. You’d think I hadn’t met a soul, when actually, I’ve been doing a fair amount of mixing! We had a lovely evening on the Hiawatha (the consular yacht) on Wednesday, with a group of Dad’s colleagues, and the night after that we went up the road to meet Dad’s girlfriend, which is a strange word to use for a woman in her forties. But she is, in fact, a lovely person. She did everything in her power to make me feel at home.
Chloe, her daughter, was somewhat less forthcoming, though we seemed to have forged an alliance of sorts. Because yesterday…’
Ye Gods! Just to write that word sapped the last of her courage. But she could not give up now. She had started; she’d persevere to the end, and perhaps, when she got there, she would have succeeded in making some sense of this.
‘…yesterday, Chloe introduced me to two boys she’s friendly with. We ended up spending the whole day together – and a pretty big chunk of the night, too. It was, for me at least, an emotional rollercoaster. We didn’t just have a car at our disposal, but a speedboat! Most of the time, I literally had no idea where I was, and I think I must be the sort of person who needs to know this. But all in all, I am glad to have had the chance to explore the strange world these boys inhabit; if nothing else, it offered a fascinating insight into the lives and mores of Turkish youth. Though I have to admit say that the process of getting to know an alien culture is a lot less straightforward than I originally assumed. I am loath to add to my already burgeoning list of questions…’
And she mustn’t. Mustn’t! The burgeoning list at the back of her notebook was for important questions. Questions about History and Monuments. Things she’d need to know for college. While the questions she was loath to add to her burgeoning list were petty, and personal, and sometimes even unkind. Like: why did Turkish teenagers think it was so amazing to own a six-year-old Mustang? And why, once they owned them, did they drive them like maniacs? Why, when they’d just almost killed you, did they turn around and wink? Why did they laugh when it really wasn’t funny, and why, when they’d said something that she had to hope was a joke, did they not even crack a smile? And why, when they’d given you every indication that…
‘…enough of this nonsense. There can be no substitute for the simple facts, which are as follows. Yesterday morning…’
Yesterday morning, she had gone downstairs to find her father sitting in the library with two strangers. One was a sharp dresser with bland, attentive eyes, whom her father introduced as ‘İsmet, my opposite number’. The other was a lank American who, she guessed, was not long out of college. He had a chiselled face punctuated by eyes set too deep for her to see their colour. His close-cropped hair ended a good inch before his tan began, and gave him the air of a shorn sheep. He was hunched over her father’s radio, fiddling with the knobs, but when he saw her, his eyebrows shot up, almost of their own accord. ‘What’s with the protocol?’ he asked. ‘Don’t I get introduced, too?’
‘Now that I think of it, no,’ my father said.
‘Have it your way,’ said the young American. He stuck out his hand. ‘Pleased to meet you. Call me No Name. And your name is?’
‘Don’t give him an inch,’ said her father.
‘Thanks,’ said No Name.
‘My pleasure,’ said her father, and Jeannie could tell that he meant it. Annoyed (because she did not need such protection), but also ashamed of feeling annoyed, she went off to the kitchen. Her father followed her in to apologise for ‘springing those goons on you.’ Something urgent had come up, he explained. ‘And as usual, yours truly has to deal with it. Typical! You’d think they had something better to do. Don’t they ever go to the beach?’ By ‘they’ she now knew he did not mean his colleagues at the consulate but Communist insurgents.
‘I’m sorry I have to leave you in the lurch like this,’ he said as he ruffled her hair. Which was, she was sure, a perfectly reasonable thing for a father to do, though there was something not right about it, something cold. It left her wondering if a father was only really a father if you grew up in the same house.
Knowing this to be something he wondered about, too, she gave him her best attempt at a smile, though if she were to be honest, the real thing she was smiling about was the prospect of a morning to herself. ‘You won’t be alone all day, I’ve made sure of that,’ her father said, responding with his usual (but still alarming) alacrity to the thought she had not voiced. ‘My friend Amy is sending that wonderful daughter of hers over to take you out for the afternoon. If she can’t show you a good time, then no one can.’
‘I didn’t have high hopes, though. We’d already met and failed to click. She took about five minutes to file me away as “tedious” and to me, she was a moody, ill-mannered girl with sultry eyes and a fondness for words that should never be allowed out of a dictionary. Which was why, when she turned up after lunch wearing a tiny tie-dye dress and huge round sunglasses and a killer pout, I just said, “Listen, we don’t have to do this.”
“Okay then,” she said. “That’s sort of how I feel, too.” But then she said, “I love this view.” Then she lost herself inside it, as people do. When she came back to herself, she lit up a Marlboro in a stiff, ceremonial way that betrayed her newness to the ritual. Then she laid out the options.
There was the Covered Bazaar. But it would be a hot and dusty trip and “deadly dull, because my mother wouldn’t give me any money.” There were the Prince’s Islands, “but the trip out there will be long and agonising and even if you wear those jeans you’ll get harassed.” The third option was a beach on the Black Sea, but there was a strong undertow and the lifeguards were hopeless. “Or I could take you to meet some boys I know.” Her pout faltered at that point, so I said, “Tell me more about these boys.”
“They’re just boys.” Then she added, “They’re fun.”
“Turkish?”
“Yes,” she said. “But their English is better than yours. Well sort of, I mean one of them. And even the other one has read Chaucer in the original and you probably haven’t.”
That, for some reason, had decided it. A quarter of an hour later, they were at Robert College, on the terrace with the postcard view of the Bosphorus. The wall was lined with students sitting with their backs to it, and facing the student dormitory, which was festooned with the same anti-American banners she’d seen in so many other parts of the city, and that her father had been more than happy (too happy?) to translate. But this afternoon, it was too hot to wonder why. The trees gave some shade but the only movement of air came from the tablecloths a group of waiters were shaking as they set up tables for a reception next to the statue of the man she now knew to be Atatürk, the nation’s founding father.
She turned her attention to the two boys in the tennis court.
‘If I’m going to be absolutely honest, the one I noticed the first was the one everyone must notice first, because he looked like he had walked off the cover of Sports Illustrated. Bronze-limbed and golden-curled – an Apollo in his tennis whites! He had an easy smile and no inclination to hurry and if he missed a shot, he just burst out laughing.
His friend was thinner and darker and more intense. He’d made no concessions to the tennis god. He was wearing a black Grateful Dead T-shirt and paint-splashed cut-off jeans, and he moved like a cat.’
He had short, black hair that was just beginning to curl its way out of a regulation haircut, and large, dark eyes, and a sunny smile that had a note of defiance in it. When a ball went over the fence, and he came out to hunt in the bushes, Jeannie noticed a bead of water rolling down his face. When he saw Jeannie noticing him, he stopped short and, for a few moments, stared back. Sulkily, expectantly – as if they had history. Was he waiting for her to smile and wave? Before she could decide, he stood up and walked away.
‘I’m still not sure what game he was playing at that point. Or Chloe. Or Apollo, whose name turned out to be Haluk. Only that there was a great deal of humming and hawing, with everyone wandering around pretending they didn’t recognise anyone, until suddenly they were throwing their tennis rackets into the back of a not very new Mustang (though apparently it is quite a coup to be the owner of a not very new Mustang in this inscrutable country) and before I knew it, we were in the Mustang, too, myself in the backseat next to the dark boy who introduced himself as “John Reed, the author of The Shot Was Heard Around the World” and had the nerve to expect me to believe him. What does he take me for, an ignoramus?
His real name is Sinan.’