Honour (8 page)

London, December 1977

There was an artists’ lounge backstage. Not that anybody called it that – only Roxana. She alone liked to think of the cold, cramped dressing room that smelled of cigarettes, talcum powder, perfume and sweat as an area for artists to rest before they went on stage. That didn’t mean she thought of herself as an
artiste
, for she did not. When need be, she would use other words to describe her profession –
performer
,
danseuse
,
entertainer
,
exotic dancer
.

It was almost midnight now. In less than fifteen minutes it would be her turn to take the stage. As she scrutinized her costume, she sprinkled silver glitter on her chest. For the first act she was dressed as a samba dancer. A tiara with flamboyant purple feathers, a bikini top ornamented with rhinestones and sequins, silvery, metallic trousers and, underneath those, the skimpiest G-string – to be revealed at the end of the show. With practised ease, she opened the make-up set and arranged the cosmetic pads and brushes of varying sizes. It was an old, worn-out kit that had been used many times by many women. The sponge applicators had turned an unhealthy mushroom tone, the mascara brushes were caked with a thick, crusty substance, and some of the colours on the palette were gone, their pans staring at her like empty eye sockets. There was no more turquoise, for instance, nor platinum nor champagne – Roxana’s favourite shades – so she went for amethyst. Again.

When she was finished with her face, she put on a frosted peach lipstick. Lastly, she pushed up her breasts and arranged them so that they looked bigger, plumper, inside the frilly bra. They never called them ‘breasts’ in England. What funny names they had instead – boobs, tits, wobblers, milky moos.

She had once danced in private for an elderly gentleman – a conservative
MP
who moonlighted as a fur merchant, so it was rumoured – and heard him say, ‘Shake your jiggly wigglies for me, love.’ It had taken her a few seconds to figure out exactly which parts of her body he was talking about.

Her English had improved remarkably over the years, although her accent was still strong, unyielding. At times, she stressed her
r
’s deliberately, stretched out her
u
’s, replaced
w
’s with
v
’s. Since she couldn’t get rid of her accent, she made it even thicker, bolder, the way everyone in England expected a Russian to speak – for that’s what Roxana told each new person she met, that she was from Russia.

In truth, she was from Bulgaria. But in England, even in London, where one heard so many languages and dialects on the street, people didn’t know much about her motherland. The Balkans were a jigsaw puzzle with myriad pieces, each of which was equally unfamiliar, eccentric. If Roxana said she was from Bulgaria, they would nod tactfully and ask no more. But whenever she remarked she was born and bred in Russia, they would respond with a barrage of questions. It was intriguing, and somehow romantic, to be from the land of snow, vodka, caviar – and, oddly,
KGB
spies.

‘Girls who aim highest end up falling down the furthest,’ people always warned. But, even if that were true, even if she would stumble eventually, and even if her dream was destined to be shorter than a butterfly’s breath, it would count for something to have made the attempt, wouldn’t it? Roxana was her own creation. She had found herself a name (Roksana, Roxane or Roxie, as men interchangeably said), a nationality, a past, a future and a story to tell. The truth, her truth, was not hidden under layers upon layers, like a Victorian lady’s petticoat. It consisted of the total of all the fabrications that made her what she was – a girl from a sleepy town in Bulgaria pretending to be Russian and dancing to Brazilian sambas in a striptease club in the heart of London.

*

Behind the stage, past the magenta curtains that had not been washed in ages, if ever, Roxana now stood ready, in full make-up. She peeked out and saw that the club was full. Another busy night. There were the regulars, a few new customers: the bachelors, the soon-to-be married, the recently divorced and the long-time husbands. Black, brown, and white. Young and old, but mostly middle aged.

Then she spotted him at the bar, drinking his soda slowly. The dark-haired Turkish man with the expression of infinite despair, who wore his apprehension like a moth-eaten jacket. She had first seen him in the gamblers’ den, where she had been invited by one of the Chinese owners. That’s where she had learned his name, Adem. She had watched him win a large sum at roulette and knew that any other man would have immediately gone out and blown every penny of that money. But he had come back the next day, played even bigger and lost all of it. One part of her despised him for his stupidity. Yet another part of her applauded his recklessness.

Since then he had turned up at every one of her shows, and each time invited her for a drink afterwards. He had been solicitous, asking her about her past, expecting to hear the gloomiest confessions. The only scrap of truth she let slip was about her father’s drinking habit.

‘Really,’ Adem said. ‘So your old man was just like mine, uh? Baba died of a swollen liver.’

That was when she winced, as if she had tripped over an unseen obstacle. She didn’t want to learn this man’s sad story. She didn’t want to learn anyone’s sad story. All she wanted was to make up her own stories, taking comfort in the knowledge that they were not, and never would be, real.

She would give him the cold shoulder, tell him to stay away from her. This might hurt his feelings, but it would be better for him – and his family. Perhaps then he would be faithful to his wife, although she doubted it. Men like him, once they started frequenting this place and fantasizing about the romantic escapades that life had denied them, did not go back to their homes until they experienced something memorably disastrous.

London, October 1977

Yunus was the only one of the Toprak children who had been born in England. His English was fluent, his Turkish halting, his Kurdish nil. He had auburn hair that curled at the ends, a few freckles across his cheeks and ears that stuck out, giving him a boyish charm. His head was slightly out of proportion to his body and a bit big for his age,
from too much thinking
, according to his mother. His eyes changed from moss-green to myrtle depending on the colour of the outfit he was wearing or his mood. He was named after the prophet Jonah, the fleeing prophet: the man who, upon learning that he was bound to inform the people about truths they weren’t ready to hear, headed for the hills, hoping to dodge the mission God had for him; the man who ended up being swallowed by a whale and having to endure three dark days and three dark nights, alone and full of remorse.

Seven-year-old Yunus loved to listen to this story, his face alight with curiosity as he pictured the fish’s stomach – dark, deep and damp. There was another reason why this ordeal interested him: just like the prophet himself, Yunus had a tendency to cut and run. When he didn’t like it at school, he ran away, and when he didn’t like it at home, he fled his family. At the slightest onset of boredom, he was on his feet, ready to take flight again. Despite Pembe’s unrelenting efforts, he spent so much time outside, mastering the side streets and back alleys of Hackney, that he could give directions to cab drivers.

Pembe said she never understood how her children could be so different from one another, and Yunus
was
different. He was the introverted one. The philosopher. The dreamer. The hermit who lived in an imaginary cave of his own, finding riches in ordinary things, company in solitude, beauty everywhere. While Iskender and Esma begrudged other people their good fortune and quarrelled, each in their own way, with their circumstances, Yunus loathed no one and belonged to himself alone. Though everyone in the family felt they were an outsider, albeit for different reasons, Yunus seemed the most comfortable in his skin. When he retreated into his inner self such was his completeness that he didn’t need any distraction. He could have lived in the belly of a fish and have been all right.

Pembe believed he had turned out this way because he hadn’t had enough of either her womb or of her milk. Yunus was the only one of her children who had been born prematurely and who, upon refusing her breasts, had had to be fed formula. ‘See the outcome? It’s made him distant, unreachable,’ she complained.

While Iskender craved to control the world, and Esma to change it once and for all, Yunus wanted to comprehend it. That was all.

*

Early in the autumn of 1977, Yunus was the first to notice that something was not right with his mother. She looked withdrawn, lost in thought. A few times she had forgotten to give him pocket money. And she also fed him less, not shoving as much food into his mouth, which is how Yunus knew something was definitely wrong. Pembe would never forget to feed him; even if it were the morning of the Apocalypse, she would make sure he went to heaven with his belly full.

Not that Yunus minded on his own account; it was always other people he was concerned about. Anyway he had found a way to make pocket money. And it was more than Pembe ever gave him.

There was a house on Moulins Road, several streets north-west of his school. A large detached Victorian building, solitary, abandoned and haunted by ghosts, according to the locals. It had a steep roof, a wrap-around porch and pointed arch windows. Yunus had discovered it on one of his many explorations in the neighbourhood. A group of young people were squatting there. Punks, anarchists, nihilists, pacifists, social dropouts and deviants of various views and many of no single affiliation . . . They were a colourful bunch, mostly in shades of red and black. Nobody in the Toprak family knew how Yunus had first made their acquaintance but the squatters liked him, the wise little boy that he was. They sent him on errands when they were knackered or simply unwilling to move. Bread, cheese, milk, ham, chocolate bars, tins of tobacco, Rizlas . . . Yunus had learned where to get the best deals for each item.

At times they also asked him to retrieve packages from a dour-faced Asian man who lived in a badly lit building, ten minutes’ ride away by bike – a task that Yunus secretly dreaded, even though the man tipped him and didn’t ask any questions. There was a disturbing stench in his place – of decay and sickness. The squatters’ house, too, stank – sometimes even worse. And yet beneath the heavy odour that enwrapped everyone and everything, there were other aromas: of flowers, spices and leaves – lives in transition.

Inside the house there was a wooden staircase winding up three floors, so steep and rotten that it wobbled every time anyone went up or came down it. The internal walls of the ground and first floors had been knocked through, creating open spaces that were used as large bedrooms – even the bathtubs had been turned into beds. The second floor was called the
agora
. The squatters regularly met there, like the ancient Greeks in a city-state, to discuss, vote on and seal the decisions of the commune.

Most of the furniture in the house was reserved for the
agora
: lamps scavenged from second-hand shops, armchairs and dining chairs – no two of which matched – sofas with cigarette burns all over them. There was an ornate crimson oriental carpet. No one knew where it had come from. A little threadbare here and there but still in good shape, it was probably the most precious item in the entire squat. Piled all around were towers of books, magazines and fanzines, and a medley of coffee mugs, wine glasses, biscuits long gone stale, harmonicas and a broken cassette player that no one tried to repair . . . Everything belonged to all and not much belonged to anyone.

The number of residents changed from week to week. This Yunus discovered on his second visit, when he met new faces and learned that some of those he had met earlier had moved out.

‘It is like a floating house,’ a man explained, and gave a stoned grin. ‘This is our ship and we’re sailing to the Big Unknown. Along the way some passengers disembark, others hop on board.’

The man’s hair was dyed canary yellow and spiked into shapes that resembled flames. It looked as if his head were on fire.

‘Yeah, an ark,’ said a young Irish woman with almond eyes, coal-black hair and a radiant smile. She turned to face the boy and introduced herself. ‘Hi, I’m –’

But Yunus never heard her name. Not then, not later. He was busy staring at her lip ring, her pierced eyebrows, and the tattoos that covered her arms, shoulders and upper chest. Noticing his astonishment, she asked him to come closer and showed him every visible tattoo on her body, like an art collector showing off his collection to a party guest.

She had an archer on her left arm because it was her sign – Sagittarius. And because she didn’t want the archer to feel alone and miserable, she had put an angel with a golden harp next to him. Starting from the nape of her neck, expanding towards both shoulders, was a large lotus flower, white and teal, the roots going all the way down her back. On her right arm was a pink rose in bloom, and underneath it a word:
Tobiko
.

‘What’s that?’

‘Oh, it’s a long story,’ she said with a shrug.

‘My sister says there’s no such thing as a long story. There are only short stories and the ones we don’t want to tell.’

‘Uh-hum, that’s cool. And what does your sister do?’

‘She’s gonna be a writer. She wants to write novels where nobody falls in love because love is for fools.’

The girl laughed. Then she told him the story of her tattoo. Once she’d had ‘Toby’ inscribed above her wrist, the name of her boyfriend.
He was in the music biz, always tanked
. But she loved him all the same. One day she told him she was pregnant, even though she wasn’t: she just wanted to see what his reaction would be. Men went one way or the other when they heard such news. You never could tell. They changed – the kindest of them reacted heartlessly, while the most stand-offish turned docile, considerate,
totally Zen
.

‘How did your boyfriend do?’ Yunus asked.

‘Oh, he went mental. He really lost it, the rat-arsed fecker!’

Toby’s response was to question whether it was his baby. And, even if it was, he said, she still had to
sort out this mess
. And that was when she ditched him, strong as the urge had been not to. Erasing a tattoo was no small feat, and there would always be a scar. She wasn’t against scars – they were part of life – but she didn’t want
his
scar on her. So she went to a tattoo artist and had him turn Toby into Tobiko.

‘Wow. And what does it mean?’

‘Oh, it’s a Japanese dish,’ she explained. ‘Flying-fish eggs.’

‘Flying-fish eggs,’ Yunus whispered, as if he didn’t want to break the spell. In front of his eyes dozens of flying fish jumped out of the water and glided gracefully towards the setting sun. Yunus, the boy named after the prophet who had survived the belly of a whale, was in love.

From then on he appeared at the squatters’ house at the slightest opportunity. They let him stay, even when there were no errands. He sat next to Tobiko, hanging on her every word, though he could rarely follow the conversation.
Unemployment, false consciousness, workers’ rights, cultural hegemony . . .
If you remained outside the capitalist system, it was impossible to make any meaningful change inside it, he learned. But if you became part of that order, it would destroy your soul.
So how do you transform something from within but remain detached from it at the same time, mate?
Yunus pondered hard as he drank smoky tea and the occasional sip of wine, but no matter how high he floated he could not come up with an answer.

At night Yunus would dream of the squatters’ house drifting in a sea so perfect it blended with the sky, where seagulls soared and swooped. He would see the squatters paddling in the water, loud and naked, like cheerful mermaids. Tobiko would be there, standing on a cliff, her long black hair fluttering in the wind as she waved at him, pure joy. Yunus would wave back, feel the sun on his face, dive deep into the blue and swim until his muscles ached.

In the morning he would wake in a wet bed.

*

There wasn’t much cooking done at the squat, save for their speciality dish: chilli con carne. Mince, tinned tomatoes and bags of kidney beans. In lieu of dinner there were biscuits, chocolate bars, apples, bananas and supermarket pastries near their expiry date. If in the mood Tobiko would bake fairy cakes with whatever was available in the kitchen and add generous amounts of hashish to the mixture.

Hackney Council had long been trying to evict the squatters so that the house could be renovated and sold for a healthy profit. There was an ongoing war between the two groups. Most recently the
LEB
, having discovered that the squatters had figured out how to connect their electricity, had sent someone round to cut it off. Now there were candles and oil lamps on every floor, eerie shadows crawling across the walls. The toilet was repeatedly blocked, the stench often vile. Yunus could not understand why Tobiko continued to live there. If only he were older and had his own job and flat, he would ask her to live with him. But then she would probably bring the Captain with her and the Captain would have to invite the entire gang, because leaders needed people to lead, and thus everyone would end up in his place, which in a few weeks would be exactly like the squatters’ house.

The man everybody called ‘the Captain’ was a rail-thin bloke with hair falling into his flint-grey eyes, teeth slightly stained from tobacco and a ring on every finger, including his thumbs. He had a penchant for saying aloud whatever came into his head. He loved to talk, his gravelly voice growing more passionate with each new point, his audience spellbound. The Captain was the first person to call Yunus a ‘Muzzie’. The boy had never heard the word before and didn’t like it at all.

‘Don’t worry,’ said Tobiko, when Yunus shared his concern with her. ‘Despite appearances, he’s not a racist. Because how can he be a racist when he’s anti-fascist, right?’

Yunus blinked.

‘What I mean is, he likes to pigeonhole people, just to know where everybody stands. His mind works like that.’

‘My sister, Esma, loves words too,’ Yunus cut in, knowing it was a silly comment but saying it anyhow.

Tobiko smiled. ‘The Captain doesn’t love words. He makes love to them.’

Envy and despair must have shown on the boy’s face, for suddenly Tobiko pulled him towards her and kissed him on the forehead. ‘Darlin’, how I wish you were ten years older!’

‘I will be,’ Yunus said matter-of-factly, even though he had blushed up to his ears. ‘In ten years.’

‘Mind, in ten years’ time I’ll be a dried prune, old and wrinkled.’ She ruffled his hair – a favourite gesture of hers that he hated, though he could never admit that to himself.

‘I’ll age fast,’ Yunus ventured.

‘Oh, I know you will. You’re already the oldest little boy I’ve ever known.’

With that she kissed him again, this time on his lips, light and wet. He felt as if he were kissing rain.

‘Don’t you ever change,’ Tobiko whispered. ‘Don’t let the greedy capitalist system get to you.’

‘O-kay.’

‘Give me your word. No . . . wait. Promise on something that matters to you.’

‘How about the Qur’an?’ asked Yunus timidly.

‘Oh, yeah. That’s brilliant.’

And there and then, his lips quivering, his heart hammering, seven-year-old Yunus made an oath to Allah that he would never ever let the capitalist system get anywhere near him, though he didn’t have the foggiest idea what that could mean.

***

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.