Turkey Street, Jack and Liam move to Bodrum

Chapter Two - Turkey Street

It was still dark when Liam boarded the early morning bus to Bodrum Airport. Barely awake, he slumped into a window seat and adjusted his eyes to the cold light of the Havaş coach. A restless night of thunder and hard rain had left him dull-minded and he struggled to focus through the misted window. Outside, the storm had calmed to a penetrating drizzle as the wind squeezed the last drops of water from the clouds. Shopkeepers and bus drivers huddled together under the bulging awning of a small kafe, sipping steaming tea and swapping hearsay before another day of hard bargaining and short hops.

Liam spotted me in the small crowd of well-wishers and launched into a passable Mary Pickford, sobbing melodramatically and pressing his lips to the coach window.

You're an idiot, I mouthed. A complete idiot.

The driver turned the ignition and slowly reversed the bus from the bay, swinging round towards the otogar exit. Liam dashed to the opposite window and traced a sad face in the condensation. For the second time in a month, he was jetting off to deal with a family crisis and I waved goodbye as the airport express disappeared into the narrow streets of Bodrum. He may have been an idiot, but Liam was my idiot and I hated to see him go.

Tired and dripping, I waded past rows of sleeping dolmuş minibuses - 'dollies,' as Liam called them - and splashed home along Turkey Street. Twenty-three centuries earlier, Alexander the Great had marched along the very same road to wrest old Halicarnassus from the doughty Persians, just before he went on to conquer half the known world. My ambitions were rather more modest: to survive the short stroll in one piece and jump back under the duck down duvet. Like many old Anatolian thoroughfares, Turkey Street was just wide enough for two emaciated camels to pass each other unhindered. This constraint never seemed to trouble the locals but for us, motorcades of Nissan tanks flanked by Vespas on amphetamines made for a testing pedestrian experience. Aided by the now-you-see-them-now-you-don't pavements, death or permanent disability lurked at every twist and turn of the perilous road.

At the first blind bend I was greeted by our neighbourhood berber, a man who crimped for a pittance six days a week and seemed as happy as a ringtone doing precisely that. In fact, we had never seen Ali without his unnerving perma-grin.

'Maybe he's just happy,' I had said to Liam.

'All of the time? And what's with the Ali Berber thing? Honestly...'

Despite the frozen smile, or maybe because of it, we became regulars at Ali's shabby but squeaky-clean barber shop, paying over the odds for our two minute crops. Through a mixture of Turklish and creative hand signalling, we would chat about the rising price of meat, the cycle of the seasons or the latest Government diktat.

Ali was sweeping out a paddling pool from the front of his shop. An obligatory picture of Atatürk was nailed above a cracked sink and the morning news blared from an old TV set hanging off the wall. I waved.

'Yağmur... rain!' he announced as I passed, his eyes raised to the heavens. 'Allah Allah!'

I stumbled on a pothole outside the artists' café and cursed. The place was boarded up for winter and judging by the bowed and broken terracotta roof, the esoteric canvases hanging inside were unlikely to survive the monsoon unscathed. The tiny shoe shop opposite was never open at any time of year. A permanent display of shoe boxes was stacked high against one side of the plate glass window and a solitary pair of red Mary Janes sat gathering dust on the other.

A sharp shower quickened my pace and powered me past Spring Lane and on to Halfway Square, a low-rise quadrangle with a rundown children's playground at its centre. On the corner, a miniature mosque was part buried in tarmac. Turkey Street had built up around it, year on year, layer by layer. Its single mini minaret scored the rolling blanket of low cloud.

I checked my phone.

'Jack, there's a man on the coach with come to bed eyes and a one way ticket to Kurdistan. I've decided to follow him and breed goats on the Iraqi border. See Ya. Liam.'

I hurried across the street to a small cluster of shops - a ladies kuaför with a trio of bonnet-hood hair dryers, a tatty laundrette with plastic chairs, a small market shop and the Stone Oven bakery - and sheltered under a wooden canopy. My stumpy thumbs struggled to reply to Liam's text. A young bread maker in a nylon hairnet, checked trousers and blue latex gloves took a break from his kneading, retrieved a cigarette from the flap of his flour-dusted apron and lit up next to me. He was soon joined by the owner of the market, a balding hippy, his side strands pulled back and fashioned into a pony tail. Marketman accepted a light from Breadmaker and they both nodded in my direction. We huddled in silent communion, together but quite separate.

'You'd look like an old drag queen mucking out goats as wife no. 3. Besides, your arse is way too skinny for saggy pantaloons. Back to Plan A.' Send.

Our attention was diverted by the rattling of a wooden cart steered by a humpbacked rag and bone man, his dusty brown suit two-toned by the rain. A frayed collar poked out of a patchwork cardigan, and an embroidered pillbox hat was balanced precariously on the side of his head. The old man stopped at a row of overflowing communal bins and saw off a cluster of alley cats with a brusque side swipe.

'Siktir git!'

A quick filter through the castoffs produced a battered coffee maker and he examined it forensically, rubbing it clean with the cuff of his jacket. He placed the swag into his cart and shuffled off to his next scavenge, whistling as he went.

Just get on with it, Jack. It could be worse. You could be working for a living.

By the time I had opened our wood panelled gate at Sentry Lane, the rain had petered out and a reticent sun was peeking through a small crack in the clouds. I pulled up the sodden bath towel draped across the bottom of the front door and wrung it out into a flower bed. Bitter experience and floating rugs had taught us that Mad Mother Nature, or at least Turkey's madder twin sister, could douse the house like a crazy car wash, pumping water under every sill and transforming Turkey Street into a raging torrent. Sometimes, without hint or warning, blue sky dreams turned to black, and sometimes Liam would leave me to stoke the embers and wring out the sodding sodden towels.

Liam called in the small hours.

'Jack?'

'Who else would it be? What's up?'

'Nothing.'

'Are you crying, Liam?'

'No.'

'Where are you?'

'In bed.'

'On the Iraqi border?'

'North Finchley. I might be longer than I thought.'

'Oh?'

'Is that a good Oh or a bad Oh?'

'Take as long as you like, Liam.'

'I miss you.'

'It's only been a few hours.'

'I guess that means something, Jack.'

'You married me, didn't you?'

'I was drunk.'

I turned on the bedside lamp and sat up in bed.

'Liam?'

'What?'

'Call every day or I'll take up with Ali Berber.'

'The wife may have something to say about that.'

'As long as she gets the housekeeping, she won't care. Get some sleep, Liam.'

'I just wanted to say goodnight, that's all.'

'Who's stopping you?'

'You say it first.'

'Liam, just put the bloody phone down.'

**************

Turkey Street, the much-anticipated sequel to Perking the Pansies, Jack and Liam move to Turkey was published on Springtime Books in paperback and e-book on 18th May 2015.