Honor (9781101606148) (9 page)

Shrewsbury Prison, 1990

Finally it has arrived. A poster of Harry Houdini. The man who could not be chained or shackled. Or imprisoned, for that matter. My idol. It's one of his earlier shots. Black and white, and many shades of grey. Houdini is young in the picture, a wiry magician with a wide forehead and stunning eyes. The sleeves of his tuxedo are rolled up, displaying half-a-dozen handcuffs around his wrists. Not a trace of fear on his face. Just a vague, pensive air to him. You would think he was surfacing from a dream.

I put it up on the wall. Trippy sees it and breaks into a grin. My cellmate's name is Patrick, but no one remembers that. Whenever he sees something that grabs his attention
 –
which happens fairly often, even in a place as dull as this
 –
he says, ‘Man, that's trippy!' Hence the name.

Trippy is younger than me, a touch shorter. Sallow skin, hair receding at the top, dark brown eyes, heavily lashed. No matter what a con's age, his mother thinks he is a good boy corrupted by bad friends. Usually, that's bollocks. In Trippy's case it's true. Nice lad from Stafford, messed with some nasty pieces of work. The funny thing is those prats were able to beat the rap, but Trippy is banged up for ten years. That's how it is. Nothing happens to jackals. Only the ones who play at being a jackal get caught. I'm not saying we're any better. Passing yourself off as a jackal is worse than being one, sometimes.

This I have never told him, but Trippy's eyes remind me of Yunus's. He's the one I miss most. I've never been a true brother to him. I wasn't there when he needed me, too busy fighting the wrong battles.

Yunus is a big man now. A talented musician. So they say. He has been to see me only twice in twelve years. Esma still visits from time to time, though not lately. She comes to tell me how much she misses, pities and hates me, in that order. Not Yunus. He has cut and run, like he always did. Even Esma's sharpest words don't hurt as much as my little brother's absence. I would like him to forgive me. If he could find it in his heart, that is. Not because I expect him to love me. That's a pipe dream. I want him to forgive me for his own good. Anger is toxic – gives you cancer. People like me are used to it, but Yunus deserves better.

‘Who is that man?' asks Trippy, pointing at the wall.

‘He was a great magician. The best.'

‘Really?'

‘Yup, some of his tricks are still a mystery.'

‘Could he make people disappear?'

‘He could make bloody elephants disappear.'

‘Wow, that's trippy!'

We spend the afternoon talking about Houdini, our heads filled with stories, and, in Trippy's case, with dope. I like to have my spliff every now and then. But that's about it. No pills, no smack. Never tried it, never will. I'm not going down that road. When I remind Trippy he has to quit, he puts his thumb in his mouth and makes a sucking noise: ‘I'm not a baby.'

‘Shut your gob!'

He grins like a naughty boy, the dope-head. But he doesn't push it. He knows he's the only one who can talk to me like that and he knows my limits.

Shortly after the evening roll call Martin appears with a short, stocky guard we've never seen before. The man has a dimple in his chin and hair so black I wonder if he dyes it.

‘Officer Andrew McLaughlin has started today. We're visiting a few cells.'

Martin is going to retire soon and he wants to make sure we'll respect this young man who's here to replace him. There is an awkward silence, like we are all embarrassed and don't know what to say. Suddenly Martin's eyes land on the poster behind me.

‘Whose idea was that?' he murmurs and without waiting for an answer he turns to me. ‘Yours, wasn't it?'

Martin is a lousy actor. He has already seen this poster. If he hadn't approved, I'd never have got it. But now he acts as if he's seeing it for the first time. Just to show the new boy he might be retirement age but he still doesn't miss a trick. He says that all these years he's watched men put up all sorts of pictures on their walls – of their wives and family, religious icons, film stars, football players, cricket players, Playboy bunnies – but Houdini, that takes the biscuit.

‘Maybe you're losing your mind,' Martin says with a chuckle.

‘Maybe,' I say.

Officer McLaughlin approaches and sniffs the air around me, like a hunting dog on a trail. ‘Or maybe he's planning to escape. Houdini was an escapologist.'

Where did that come from? The vein on my forehead throbs mildly. ‘Why would I do that?'

‘Yeah,' Martin asks, his eyes suddenly harder. ‘Why would he do that?'

Then he turns to the new screw and explains. ‘Alex has been here since '78. He has only two more years to go.'

‘One year and ten months,' I correct him.

‘Yeah,' Martin says and nods as if that sums up everything.

In Martin's face, as usual, there are two feelings competing
 –
revulsion and respect. The former was there from day one and has never disappeared
 –
contempt for a man who committed the worst crime imaginable and screwed up the one life God gave him. The respect came much later, and most unexpectedly. We have a history together, Martin and I.

But Officer McLaughlin's face tells a different story. ‘I think I know your case,' he says flatly. ‘I remember reading about it and saying to myself how could anyone do that to his own mother.'

I realize we are the same age. Not only that. We are the same material. We might have frequented the same streets as teenagers, kissed the same girls. The strangest feeling seizes me
 –
as if I'm looking in a skewed mirror. McLaughlin is the man I could have become had I followed a different path. And I'm the convict he might have turned into had he not managed to duck at the last minute.

‘Fourteen years, eh? What a shame,' he says.

Martin coughs nervously. You don't remind a man of his crime in passing, like chatting about the weather. You do that only when push comes to shove. Usually no one reminds anyone of what went before. A man in gaol is a man incarcerated in the past anyway.

‘Alex has turned a corner in the last few years,' Martin butts in, like a tourist guide. ‘He's gone through some dark times and is now coming back.'

Dear old Martin. Such optimism. I've been through hell, true. But he knows and Trippy knows and I know and my mother's ghost knows that I'm still there.

I had an awful reputation. I suppose I still do. I easily went for a rib. It was hard to predict what would piss me off. Even I couldn't tell most of the time. When I was off key I got violent. My left punch was as strong as a brick, so they say. Sometimes I just burst out. The only other cons who would get like this were the junkies. When they craved goods and there was no supply, they lost their rag. But I'm no addict. And that makes me scarier, perhaps. This is my sober state of mind. I harmed myself. My head. Because I didn't like what was in there. I burned cigarettes inside my palms. They swelled, like puffy eyes. I slashed my legs. Lots of meat on a leg, the thighs, the knees, the ankles. Plenty of possibility. In Shrewsbury a razor is as precious as a ruby, but not as impossible to find.

‘You two will get to know each other,' says Martin.

‘Well, I'm sure we will,' says Officer McLaughlin.

Trippy is watching the tension build, uneasy. He knows what's happening. He's seen it before. Sometimes a screw takes against one of us and that's the end of the story. You get off to a bad start and it never gets any better.

The tourist guide makes another attempt at reconciliation. ‘Alex is a boxer. He's our athlete. He earned a medal when he was at school.'

It is a funny thing to say in my defence and needless to say no one laughs. I want to thank Martin for backing me, but if I move my eyes away from the young officer, even for a second, I will leave myself open.

He has to see I'm no wimp. The last time I was one, it was over twenty years ago. I was a boy in a tree running away from circumcision. It didn't help. Since then I've never been weak. I've been wrong. Fucking wrong. But never weak. So I don't flinch, I don't blink, I keep staring into the eyes of this McLaughlin, who is staring into my eyes probably for the same bloody reasons.

Then they leave.

*

I wake up in the middle of the night with a start. At first I think my mother has visited me. But, hard as I try, I can't feel her presence. No rustle like a leaf falling, no soft glow like moonlight trapped. There is only Trippy, snoring, farting, grinding his teeth, fighting his demons.

I sit bolt upright on the bed and look around to find out what on earth could have woken me up. And then I see it. There on the floor is a paper. Somebody must have pushed it through the bars in the door. In the dimmest light penetrating from the corridor, I pick it up. It's a newspaper clipping. The
Daily Express
.

BOY KILLED HIS MOTHER FOR ‘HONOUR',
2
DECEMBER
1978

A 16-year-old boy of Turkish/Kurdish origin stabbed his mother to death in Hackney in an act of honour killing. Iskender Toprak stabbed Pembe Toprak in front of the family home on Lavender Grove.

It is claimed that the 33-year-old mother of three had an extramarital affair. Neighbours said, though they remained married, Adem and Pembe Toprak no longer lived together. ‘But when the father is absent like that the mother's honour is guarded by the eldest son, which in this case was Iskender,' said an eyewitness. The police are now investigating whether the teenager, who is still at large, acted alone or was used as a pawn by other family members to carry out a collective murder plan.

A spokeswoman for Scotland Yard told
The Times
that this case was neither the first nor would it be the last in the
UK
and Europe. She announced that at the moment they were investigating 150 deaths that could be linked to honour killings. ‘Sadly the number could be higher since not all cases end up in the hands of the police,' she said. ‘Family and neighbours know more than they tell. Those closest to the victims are the ones who suppress valuable information.'

‘It is a growing cancer in modern society,' the spokeswoman added, ‘given that in numerous communities the honour of the family is deemed to be more important than the happiness of its individuals.'

My hands shake so hard that the newspaper clipping flaps as though in a mighty wind. I'm dying for a cigarette. Or a drink. Something strong and simple. My father never knew this, but me and the boys used to have a cider or beer every now and then. Never whisky, though. That was another league. I had my first taste of it under this roof. You can find anything in gaol, if you know your way around.

I fold the paper in half, creasing the corners down into the middle. A square, two triangles, a rectangle . . . I make the corners meet, pull the triangles apart and there it is: a paper boat. I put it on the floor. There is no water to make it float. No gust to push the sails. You would think it was made of cement. It doesn't go anywhere. Like the pain in my chest.

Iskender Toprak

London, December 1977

We lived in Hackney, on a street called Lavender Grove. It was a constant disappointment to my mother that there were no lavender bushes around, only the name. She never stopped hoping to find some one day, in someone else's garden, or around a corner, a forgotten grove, a sea of purple.

I loved the neighbourhood. Afro hair salons, the Jamaican café, the Jewish baker's, the Algerian boy behind his fruit stall who pronounced my name in a funny way and always had a little present for me, the penniless musicians who lived around the corner and rehearsed every day with their windows open and introduced me, without knowing it, to Chopin; the artist who drew portraits in Ridley Road Market for ten bob, and once made mine for only a smile. All creeds and colours.

Before this house, there was a flat in Istanbul – the place where Iskender and I had spent the early years of our childhood but that now belonged to another time, another country. This was where our family had lived prior to our move to England in May 1970, shortly before Yunus was born. Like many expatriates, Mum, too, had a selective memory. Of the past she had left behind, she would reminisce mostly, if not solely, about the good things: the warm sunshine, the pyramids of spices in the market, the smell of seaweed in the wind. The native land remained immaculate, a Shangri-La, a potential shelter to return to, if not actually in life, at least in dreams.

My recollections, however, were of a mixed nature. Perhaps, of the past they share together, children never remember the same bits as their parents. Once in a while my mind ran back to the basement in that old house: the furniture upholstered in azure; the round, white, crocheted lace doilies on the coffee tables and kitchen shelves; the colony of mould on the walls; the high windows that opened on to the street . . . The flat etched in my memory was a dimly lit place where a crackly radio was on all day long and a faint odour of decay lingered in the air. It was always dusk in there, morning or afternoon made little difference.

I was little when the place was
home
to me. I would sit cross-legged on the carpet in the living room and look up with my mouth half open at the windows near the ceiling. Through them I could see a frantic traffic of legs flowing left and right. People going to work, returning from shopping or out for a promenade.

Watching the feet of the passers-by and trying to guess what their lives were like was a favourite game of ours – a game with three players: me, Iskender and Mum. So, for instance, we would see a pair of shiny stilettos walking at a brisk, hurried pace, ankle straps neatly tied, heels clattering against the pavement. ‘I think she's going to meet her fiancé,' Mum would say and then come up with an intriguing story of love and heartache. Iskender, too, was good at this game. He would spot a pair of worn-out, dirty moccasins and fabricate a story about how they belonged to a man who had been without a job for quite some time and was now so desperate he was going to rob the bank around the corner, where he would get shot by the security guard.

Though the basement did not get enough sunshine, it did receive plenty of rain. Drizzles were no threat, but whenever it rained more than two inches in the city the drains in the house overflowed, engulfing the back room in a messy, murky lake. Wooden ashtrays, spatulas, picture frames and bamboo baskets were good swimmers. Baking trays, chopping boards, teapots, and the pestle and mortar were hopeless. While the glass vase on the table would plummet fast, the plastic flowers in it would float. Then there was the backscratcher . . . I wished it, too, would sink, but it never did.

My parents had talked about moving out of the apartment, but, even if they had had the means and found a sunnier basement in this impoverished neighbourhood, there was no guarantee that it would endure Istanbul's infamous downpours any better. Perhaps over the years they had also developed an attachment to their flat. Dark and damp it may have been, but it was, nevertheless, home.

Istanbul . . . Deep in the slow, whirling memories the city's name stood out from the hundreds I had stored away throughout my life. I placed the word on my tongue, sucking on it slowly, eagerly, as if it were a boiled sweet. If London were a confection, it would be a butterscotch toffee – rich, intense and traditional. Istanbul, however, would be a chewy black-cherry liquorice – a mixture of conflicting tastes, capable of turning the sour into sweet and the sweet into sour.

*

My mother first started to work shortly after my father had gambled away two months' worth of wages. Suddenly, money was needed like never before. While Iskender was at school, Mum started to go to the houses of the rich, where she would take care of their toddlers, cook their food, clean their rooms, scour their saucepans, iron their clothes and occasionally offer a shoulder to cry on. I would be left in the care of a neighbour, an old woman with a sharp tongue and poor hearing, but otherwise nice.

In the evenings Mum would tell us, as if they were bedtime stories, about life in the villas where every child had his or her own room, and modern husbands invited their wives to have a drink with them. She had once seen a couple put jazzy music on a machine and dance – which had struck her as something of a shame, for they stepped on the carpet with their dusty shoes, confirming her belief that there was something queer about the wealthy. Otherwise why would anyone throw green olives into their drinks, ruin lush carpets and nibble yellow cheese cubes jabbed with toothpicks?

After working for several families, Mum found a full-time job. They were famous people, her employers. The woman was an actress and had just given birth to a girl. As for her husband, we never came to learn what exactly he did, but he was always busy and travelled frequently, that much we knew. My mother's job was to take care of the house and the baby, as well as the actress, who didn't seem to be coping well with the changes in her life. Colicky and moody, the baby constantly cried. But the new mother wept just as easily and sometimes even more. She was beautiful – almond eyes, jet-black hair, a shapely nose, slender hands with the thinnest veins. If her fans had seen her like this, they might have been disappointed, but Mum felt a rush of fondness for her in her shabby, despondent state.

By then the old lady who looked after me had fallen sick and Mum started taking me with her. While I played on my own, she would toil, and secretly sprinkle cardamom seeds around the actress's bed to protect her from the
djinn
. Then we would take a bus and a
dolmush
,
*
and go home, just as the sky hung low and dim above the city. A full month went by. Mum expected to get her wages any day, but there was no mention of it and she was too shy to ask.

One afternoon, while Mum was cooking and I was playing under the kitchen table, the woman's husband appeared. There was a faint, sour odour emanating from him – aftershave and whisky. His eyes were bloodshot but oddly amused. Unaware of my presence, he staggered towards Mum and grabbed her sides.

‘Hush,' the man said, putting his finger to his lips. ‘They're all sleeping.'

They're all sleeping. They won't see us. They're all sleeping. So we can sleep too. I'll buy you nice things. Shoes, bags, clothes, a pair of golden earrings . . . You're a good woman, a saint. Please have pity on me. My wife will never know. Neither will your husband. They're all sleeping. I'm not a bad man. But I am a man, like any other, and I have needs. My wife isn't a woman any more. She's changed since the baby, always weeping, whining. The entire city is sleeping.

My mother pushed the man against the wall; in his drunken state he offered little resistance. His hands dangled at his sides, his body slackened as if it were empty, like a soft toy. Yanking me with one hand, grabbing her handbag with the other, Mum stomped down the corridor, but then realized we didn't have enough money to go home.

‘Sir . . .' she said. ‘You haven't given me my wages.'

He was standing by the door, slightly teetering. ‘You want money?' he asked, sounding surprised.

‘It's my monthly –'

He cut in. ‘You treat me like this and on top of that you want my money? What a bitch you are!'

We marched out of the house. We took the bus, got off at our usual stop and decided to walk the rest of the way home. But Mum wasn't paying attention to where we were going. Step by step, we drifted away from main avenues into serpentine streets that seemed to lead nowhere. It was getting dark. We found ourselves by the seaside in an area where we had never before set foot. There were huge, black rocks along the shore, the waves crashing against them. We sat there, catching our breath, observing the splendour of the city and its indifference to us.

Noticing tiny seashells on the beach, I stood up to collect them. I was still lingering by the sea when I saw two men approach my mother. They were eating sunflower seeds, spitting the shells out, leaving a trail behind them like in the Hansel and Gretel story.

‘Good evening, sister, you seem so sad,' said the first one. ‘What's a woman like you doing here at this hour?'

‘Yeah, you look like you need help,' said the other.

Mum didn't answer. She fumbled in her handbag for a handkerchief, still sniffing. A few hairpins, house keys, bills to pay, a handful of hazelnuts she had taken with her but forgotten to give me, a photo of her children, and a mirror in which she saw her melancholy, but no handkerchief.

‘Do you have anywhere to go tonight? Why don't you join us?'

‘We'll take care of you,' the other said sassily.

‘I don't need your help,' Mum retorted, her voice tinted with irritation. Then she turned towards the shore, and yelled, ‘Esma, come here, quickly!'

The men were surprised to see me, but they didn't back off. Instead they followed us silently. It was a game. Mum would resist. They would insist. Mum would resist. They would insist. Mum would surrender.

‘Get away! Don't you see I'm a married woman?'

One of the men glanced nervously at her, but the other scoffed and rolled his eyes as if to say, So what?

Dark and misty, there were fewer and fewer pedestrians around, and the traffic was sparse. We hurried, careful to avoid the corners, where the moonlight etched grey outlines on the trees. We saw one or two women, strolling next to their husbands or brothers, enjoying the protection, the privilege. Ten minutes had gone by, or maybe more, when we came across an old man with a boy.

‘
Selamun aleykum
. Are you all right?'

Not waiting for Mum to respond, I blurted out, ‘We're lost.'

Tipping his head in a gentle nod, the old man smiled at me. ‘And where is your home, my dear?'

Mum whispered a district, but out of courtesy she added that he shouldn't worry about us.

‘Well, you're in luck. My grandson and I are going that way too.'

‘No, we aren't,' objected the boy, who was slightly older than me.

The old man squeezed his grandson's shoulder. ‘Sometimes the shortest way is to follow a friend's route.' Then he turned to the two men behind us and scowled so hard that they averted their eyes, suddenly embarrassed.

Thus we started our walk home – Mum, me, the old man and the boy. I inhaled the salty scent the wind brought from the sea, eternally grateful to the strangers who had so unexpectedly turned into companions of the road. When we reached our street, Mum asked the man the name of his grandson.

‘Yunus,' he said with pride. ‘He'll be circumcised next month,
inshallah
.'

‘If God gives me another son,' Mum said, ‘I shall remember you and name him Yunus, so that he can be as kind to strangers as you have been to me.'

*

Back in the basement flat, sitting under the windows now filled with a slate-coloured emptiness, my father was waiting, chain-smoking. The moment he heard our keys in the lock, he leaped to his feet. ‘Where have you been?'

‘We had to walk,' Mum said, and frowned at me. ‘Esma, take your coat off and go back to your room.'

She pushed me towards the corridor, and closed the door so harshly it bounced open again and stood slightly ajar. ‘I didn't have the money for the
dolmush
.'

‘What do you mean you didn't have the money? How much did they give you?'

‘Nothing. I'm not going to work for them again.'

‘What the hell are you talking about?' my father asked, raising his voice a notch, but no more. ‘I have debts, you know that.'

‘They didn't pay me . . .'

For almost a full minute I didn't hear a sound. Then, as if surfacing from dark waters to grab a breath, my father inhaled loudly. ‘You come home at this hour and you think I'm going to believe your lies. Where's the money, you whore?'

There was a backscratcher on the sofa. A mustard-yellow, cold tool made of a ram's horn. In the twinkling of an eye, he grabbed it and flung it at Mum, who was so distracted by his words that she failed to dodge it in time. The implement hit her on the side of her face with a thud, cutting her neck.

No, my father Adem Toprak did not beat his wife or his children. And yet on that night, and on other nights in the ensuing years, he would easily lose his temper and turn the air blue with words that were full of pus and bile; he would smash objects against the walls, all the while hating the entire world for pushing him to the edge, where he feared the shadow of his abusive father was waiting to tell him he might not, in the end, be that different from him.