Deep Waters

About the Author

Trained as an actress, Barbara Nadel is now a public relations officer for the National Schizophrenia Fellowship’s Good Companions Service. Her previous job was a mental health advocate in a psychiatric hospital. She has also worked with sexually abused teenagers and taught psychology in both schools and colleges. Born in the East End of London, she has been a regular visitor to Turkey for over twenty years.

Copyright © 2002 Barbara Nadel

The right of Barbara Nadel to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published as an Ebook by Headline Publishing Group in 2011

Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

eISBN: 978 0 7553 8645 1

Headline Publishing Group

An Hachette UK Company

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Table of Contents

This book is dedicated to the memory of my beloved father. His untimely death in August 2001 robbed the world of a generous, funny and magical soul. No words I can write will ever do him real justice.

The woman’s hooded eyes widened in alarm.

‘You’re not going out, are you?’ she said to the young man’s back as he squinted to see himself in the mirror fragment over the sink.

‘We need money,’ he replied simply.

The woman, who was only fourteen years older than her son, moved her bulk between man and mirror and faced him foursquare, her hands on her hips.

‘If you’re stealing cars—’

‘No, I’m not stealing cars, Mother,’ he said, his voice beginning to exhibit irritation.

‘When you tried to take wallets from people’s pockets you got caught.’

‘But I got away, didn’t I?’ He looked up into his mother’s prematurely aged face. ‘And anyway, this isn’t about that, is it?’

‘No.’

For a few seconds, silence replaced words as the young man and his mother looked intensely into each other’s eyes. On the floor various old baby toys plus several packets of disposable nappies moved gently in the draught that rocked the door of the family’s washroom.

‘If they see you they’ll try to kill you. They must.’ Her words were starkly factual, only the familiar ear could have detected the fierce emotion that lay behind them.

Her son sighed. ‘What, Mehti? It’s
only
Mehti, Mother. I see him every day! He’s an idiot, he’s retarded . . .’

The woman, her eyes now downcast, bit thoughtfully on her bottom lip. ‘If we need money then I will get it,’ she said. ‘I can beg and I can steal . . . It’s dark now, evil.’

‘This is business, Mother.’ He rubbed way too much cheap aftershave lotion into his chin and then wiped the residue off his hands onto his jeans. ‘Big money.’

‘But what—’

‘Don’t ask! Don’t make me lie to my own blood!’

‘Rifat—’

‘No!’

Turning away from his mother, Rifat took a thin belt down from one of the hooks on the wall and threaded it round the waistband of his jeans. Though well-proportioned, he was a short man, beginning to exhibit signs of impending obesity. But still he was, so his mother thought now, a very handsome man, not unlike his father, or rather the man his father had once been.

Just the thought of it made her next words shake with emotion. ‘If they kill you then the blood will never stop running. You know that, don’t you, Rifat?’

Rifat opened the door to a quick and wicked wind from the central Asian steppes. As his hair moved slightly in the draught, he smoothed it down with one hand and with the other picked up a small, brightly wrapped parcel. Then, smiling, he said, ‘If they kill me, I would expect the blood never to end. Not for a man like me.’

And then he was gone. As he pulled the door shut behind him, a small wisp of the dense night-time fog puffed muscularly into the room before expiring down on the floor.

When she was certain that he could no longer hear her, his mother muttered, ‘Stupid, stupid, stupid boy!’

Only the walls were in a position to respond; the rest of her family were either asleep or dead.

There had been a time, Dr Zelfa Halman recalled, when to put a call through from İstanbul to anywhere outside Turkey had necessitated lengthy planning and patience. And although she was an educated woman who knew that progress was inevitable, she still never ceased to marvel at just how quickly she could now connect with her maternal family in the Irish Republic. Quickly, that is, provided one allowed for the slow progress of one Father Francis Collins from his favourite chair to the old dial telephone that always had and always would live in the hall. Uncle Frank, as he was to Zelfa, was nearly eighty years old now; just three years senior to her mother, had she lived.

A deep cough preceded Father Collins’ recitation of his telephone number.

It made Zelfa smile. ‘Still smoking then, Uncle?’ she said, the lilt of her Irish voice increasing with each English word spoken.

‘Now then, Bridget, is that any way to speak to a man of God?’

She laughed both at the irony in his tone and at the use of her Irish name. After twelve years in Turkey, ‘Bridget’ was somebody she could only sometimes, and selectively, relate to.

‘So to what do I owe the pleasure of your call?’ the old priest inquired. ‘Are you coming home for a bit or what?’

‘Well, I do hope to come home soon, yes, but . . .’ she paused briefly to light a cigarette. ‘What I actually wanted to do was ask for your advice.’

‘I thought you lot had that sort of thing sewn up pretty much,’ he replied, the irony still there in his voice.

‘Even psychiatrists need help sometimes, Uncle Frank.’

‘True. But since you and God parted company when you were about eighteen, I can’t see what I can offer you in the way of advice that you won’t find risible. Fags and booze aside, my own views about morality are informed by Our Lord as opposed to your man Freud.’

‘Uncle Frank, a Turk has asked me to marry him.’ There now, it was out. Briefly she looked into the mirror across the hall, seeing herself as a small, grey blob. Purposefully she addressed herself to the telephone again. ‘Uncle Frank?’

‘Er . . .’ The old man cleared his throat of what sounded like several pounds of phlegm. ‘Oh, well, that’s, um . . . Your father must be pleased . . .’

‘Dad doesn’t know yet.’

‘Well, shouldn’t you be—’

‘Uncle Frank, I’m forty-seven years old, for God’s sake! I can tell whoever I like in whatever order I choose!’

A brief moment of silence ensued, a moment during which the priest, at least, drew breath.

‘Seeing as your father’s a Turk,’ he said, ‘and you now live there yourself, I can’t see what your problem might be, Bridget. I mean, were you even slightly interested in your faith—’

‘This man, Mehmet he’s called, is twelve years younger than I am, Uncle Frank.’

A sharp intake of breath on the part of the priest caused Zelfa to scale even higher reaches of verbal desperation.

‘I look so old compared to him! He’s about as fit as a man can be, Uncle Frank, and I just look like a fat, grey troll at his side! And I’m too old to have his children! I mean, what the hell can he see in me? I mean—’

‘Well, if we discount the good living you people tend to make, which I am sure this man gives not a hoot for,’ Father Frank said, ‘then we’re left only with your wit, intelligence, beauty and charm. And given that these qualities are all that you have, then I suppose this lad must be quite mad to want to marry you.’

In spite of herself, Zelfa smiled. OK, the old man was biased but she knew that when it came to the matter of her attractiveness, she was her own worst enemy and her hardest critic. Very deep down indeed, she knew that the truth lay somewhere between what her uncle had said about her and her own perception of herself. However . . .

‘But when I’m sixty he’ll only be forty-eight!’

‘And when you’re a hundred he’ll be eighty-eight and you’ll both look like shite! But if he still loves you and you still love him then what of it?’ Although the old man was over two thousand miles away from her, Zelfa distinctly heard him take a cigarette out of his packet, stick it in his mouth and light up. ‘What I’m saying, Bridget, I suppose, is that if he loves you, nothing much else matters. Does he love you?’

‘He says he does, although I can’t think why.’

Frank Collins sighed. So like her mother in so many ways – except the most important one. Bridget, although twice as clever and considerably prettier than her mother, had never matched Bernadette Halman’s supreme self-confidence. Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that Bernadette had pursued and won so many lovers in her short life – several while she was still living with Bridget’s father. Maybe that knowledge had undermined Bridget’s confidence in the concept of marriage. Or maybe it was as she said, that this man was too young to be able to give her any sense of security. Only Bridget and this Mehmet character could know. But then his niece was asking for his advice and, for good or ill, he had to give it to her. After all, if a priest couldn’t give advice (and do a little bit around saying Mass too!) then what could he do?

‘Well, you either trust his word or you don’t, Bridget,’ he said at length, ‘and only you can make that decision. Do you love him?’

‘I’d happily die for him, Uncle Frank.’ Such passionate words made her seem much younger than she was – they sounded almost like the protestations of a teenager. But then as the Irish branch, at least, of Bridget’s family had always been sadly aware, there had never been even the slightest whiff of marriage in her life before. She was really quite green when it came to affairs of the heart.

‘So if you love him,’ the priest began, ‘and he—’

‘How can he love me? I keep thinking he must be some kind of deviant or gold digger!’ she cried mournfully, now very close to tears.

‘Is he poor?’

‘No. His family reckon they’re impoverished but that’s only in comparison to the shitloads of money they once had. They’re aristocrats.’

‘Are they so?’

‘But he, Mehmet, he’s just a policeman. They earn sweet F.A. here.’ She put her cigarette out in the ashtray and then immediately lit another. ‘Not, of course, that he’s ever asked me for money. He’s spent a lot of money on me, taken me out and . . .’

‘Made you very happy, by the sound of it,’ the priest added tartly.

Zelfa, now a little more subdued, especially in light of what her uncle had just said, bowed her blonde head. ‘Yes. Yes, he has.’