Derdâ opened the door and found Stanley standing there. Her eyes opened wide in utter shock. She felt paralyzed.
Confused at the appearance of a young girl at his house, Stanley asked her, “Who are you? Where’s dad?”
“He’s inside,” Derdâ whispered. She was hardly able to speak. Behind Stanley there was a man in blue overalls holding a stack of cardboard boxes waiting to come in.
“Everything’s going upstairs,” Stanley said. Then he took a closer look at Derdâ. He looked at her Cramps T-shirt. Narrowing his eyes, he thought for a moment, but then shaking his head he stepped inside.
“Dad! Dad, where are you?”
When Steven appeared at the top of the stairs, Stanley turned and looked at Derdâ in pure shock. He didn’t know what to say or think. Which one had been his next-door neighbor until just a month ago? The bald girl who had the same eyes and the right body, or the one in the black chador? Steven spoke and then he knew.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
Stanley took a few steps forward and said, “Dad? Is that really you?” He turned to Derdâ. “And you? Are you …”
Steven came downstairs and stood between, like a carbon copy of his idol.
“She’s the mysterious mistress of us all!”
The words “Mysterious Mistress” flashed on the screen when Derdâ made her first appearance in her first film. It was Stanley’s idea. It had been his idea. Now he lowered his head and stared at the girl standing before him. Life is such an infernal web of coincidences, he thought.
Derdâ was in no position to deny it. She accepted the nickname with a nod of her head. And Stanley started to laugh. Soon he was roaring with laughter.
Stanley had moved back home. He moved into his old room on the second floor of his father’s house and became another one of the sullen kids in Crouch End who never grow up.
After he got over the initial shock of his father in effect becoming Derdâ—all it had taken was for Stanley to find the transformation entirely absurd and then just laugh it out—he told them about Bezir’s murder in Finsbury Park and everything that had happened after that. But he didn’t mention that he’d been fired from Stick and that he had to leave the apartment because he’d blown all his money on heroin.
“I was scared, Dad,” he said. “The place had turned into a living hell. Think of it, they shot my neighbor!”
Steven shook his head and said, “Then you’ll just have to stay here, there’s nothing else we can do about it.”
Then, pointing out Derdâ to his son, he went on, “You two have met, right?”
“That’s right,” said Stanley, smiling. And turning to Derdâ, he said, “So we’ve met before then.” All his admiration and respect for his former master was gone. She was no longer covered. Those feelings blew away like a handful of dust in the wind. She looked like any other girl from London to him now. She looked like any one of those idiots killing time out on the streets. He listened to his father’s romantic story. How he’d first met Derdâ in the Istanbul consulate and then their dramatic reunion on a sidewalk bench in Crouch End. He was convinced it was all fated to be. Stanley could understand why Derdâ liked staying in the house. In the kitchen, he told Derdâ the police were looking for her. He made a point of letting his father know, too. He hoped this would encourage him to get rid of her. But his father was now Rahime, and he didn’t give a damn about Scotland Yard.
Stanley didn’t mind that his father now wore a chador, or that Derdâ ordered him around as her slave. Still somehow it reminded him—if only rarely—of happy days in the past and of his mother. But were those really happy days? First of all, his mother hadn’t really been around. She’d left home when Stanley was eight. After opening a ninth anniversary gift Steven had given her she just up and left, just half an hour after thanking Steven for the steel balls chained together, thinking that it was some sort of necklace. Only twenty-five minutes after Steven told her, “But they’re for me, not for you.” Twenty-four minutes after she heard him say, “I want you to push both those balls into me one by one.” In the years that followed, she’d done everything she could to gain custody of Stanley. But the judge in charge of their divorce proceedings was Steven’s friend. They knew each other from the London dungeons where Steven had himself whipped on the weekends. In the end, the verdict came quickly enough and it was in Steven’s favor. Then the judge pushed those steel balls into Steven as eight-year-old Stanley watched them through the keyhole of his office door.
After that, something happened to Stanley, some kind of strange chemical reaction occurred, and he stopped growing and felt tremendous pain. Like all people who suffer such a life, Stanley lived in his own fantasies. But when he stepped into the pit and came in contact with reality, he really began to suffer. He got older without really growing and he felt the pain more and more. So he began to fill those voids with the
