Our two guides were supposed to leave us and our boxes at a building known as the English House.
The small plump man with specs who bustled out of the clapboard wooden house alongside the small church shook hands with all four of us.
‘Alan Weir. Been expecting you. Not really English: South African, but every time I said South African these beggars said English, and eventually they won. Wanted me to be English, you see. Now I’m sub-Consul for these parts. Trade mainly.’ He made you breathless just listening to him.
‘Charlie Bassett,’ I told him. ‘You’re the South African Consul?’
‘No, British. Don’t worry, you’ll understand eventually.’ He wore a dodgy dog collar on top of a grubby shirt. He was about fifty.
‘And you’re a priest?’
‘Minister. Methodist. Don’t let it worry you though.’ He seemed determined that nothing was going to worry me. That was interesting.
Hudd gave the guides another gold coin each. They were delighted. One opened his shirt to show me that he already had two strung on a horsehair lanyard around his neck.
‘Made him rich,’ Weir told us.
‘What will he do with it?’
‘Buy another wife. He already has one; you can tell that from the tattoo on the back of his hand.’ I’d travelled with the guy for nearly four days, and hadn’t noticed the blue star just above a knuckle.
They helped us carry the boxes into Weir’s house. Two boxes took two men each to lift. The third was lighter. They left that for me. I was sweating before I put it down. After Şiwan’s people had left, laden now with panniers of flat breads, yoghurt, fresh water – and big toothless smiles – the minister told us, ‘Some people might think your boxes safer in the church, but they’d be wrong. There is more than one Islamic sect, you see, and whenever they fall out with each other they burn our church down.’
I thought about it. ‘That doesn’t make much sense.’
‘Does, you know. It’s the only thing they can agree upon. Come and have some tea: you’ve missed lunch.’
I don’t know what I’d expected, but cheese and watercress sandwiches, in proper white bread, weren’t all that high up on the list. Earl Grey tea, too. I recognized it as such because it was what Grace’s mother once served me in the orangery of her huge house, when I was still getting on with them. There we were, sitting beside a small fortune in gold coins, at the end of the fucking world, enjoying an English afternoon tea. I told you: surrealism is all around you – all you have to do is look.
Weir’s guest room looked exactly the same as Şiwan Van’s. Even the furniture, carpets and beds had come out of the same shop. Maybe they had used the same interior decorator. We shoved the boxes under the beds. Then I had a bath – the first hot water in nearly two weeks – and went for a snooze. Hudd was already on his back and snoring. Even from across the room, he smelled worse than our donkeys. When I awoke it was dark through the small window, and I was alone. I had a hard-on. That happens to men, you know, but we don’t often talk about it. I was also thinking about Haye with an e. That was interesting.
When Hudd came down to the dining room he had spruced himself up. We dined local style, cross-legged on carpets around a low table. There was a mudbrick stove in the corner, throwing out a decent heat, and finer carpets between the niches in the wall. These small hollows contained candles, highly polished brass pots and small religious paintings . . . and a large wooden crucifix propped up in a corner reminded us where we were. The food had been served by a rather beautiful girl of about eighteen in native clothes; bright silks. She laughed a lot, and surprised me by joining us once the food was on the table. Her eyes and hair were as black as crows’ feathers.
‘My wife, Arzu,’ Weir offered. ‘Turkish. She was a server in our church in Ankara when we met. So we had to come out here.’
I smiled at her, pointed to myself and said, ‘Charlie,’ and to Hudd, and said, ‘Hudd.’ Then, ‘Thank you for putting up with us.’ I spoke laboriously, hoping that she could follow it. She smiled back prettily. I bet she did everything prettily.
‘You are welcome; Alan likes entertaining, but doesn’t often get the opportunity.’ The only sign that English wasn’t her first language was the way she strung out the five-syllable word.
Hudd nodded, and said, ‘You speak wonderful English.’
‘I learned at the English School. Alan taught me.’
‘Minister,’ I said to him. ‘Consul, and teacher too . . .’
‘Head teacher . . .’ she corrected me.
‘Keeps me off the streets,’ he said, and laughed.
‘. . . and he sells the bus tickets,’ she added. I liked the way that smiles moved between them as if they were speaking a private language.
Ah, I thought, and asked him, ‘Where does your bus go?’
‘Istanbul; if your backsides can bear it. Takes three days on wooden seats . . . now, where do you want to start; lamb or goat?’ He lifted the lid on two steaming dishes of meat and vegetables. The smells rose orange and yellowy from them, and thick, like London fogs. My mouth literally watered. I almost missed the blue star on the back of his hand as I handed my plate to
