Hazel Norbury

Turkish Mosaic

Novel extract

[This is an extract from the middle of the novel]

As expected, there was a rap at my front door early the following Saturday morning. A set of keys dangled in my face, behind which Kenan’s eyes sparkled with excitement. ‘Çabuk, cabuk,’ he said, giving me a quick hug.

‘Alright, calm down. Just let me find my bag.’

I hurried after him and there it was hugging the kerb. Virgin-white paintwork, windows untouched by grubby fingers. Inside, rows of beige leather seating, rubber matting on the floor, shiny like liquorice, and that same smell, too. I clambered into the back. We set off, winding down main roads and side streets to pick up my teaching friends, Cathy and Duncan first, then Aussie Jayne. They worked in another private lycée. Seven miles beyond Adana, Debbie and Paul, civilians stationed at Incirlik airbase, also hopped in. The dolmuş swallowed them all Tardis-like. 

‘Hey, how’s it going, guys?’ Kenan shouted into the back. Most had stayed at the pansiyon in Kızkalesi or met him at parties. And that morning most were bleary-eyed after the excesses of the night before. After greetings and compliments on his new purchase, everyone settled in for the journey. The invitation had come to join Kenan and his family a few weeks previously. We’d be heading to a religious site some twenty miles outside Adana, where people went to bless new important things in their lives. He’d asked me first, his features darkening for a moment. I wondered if he was about to cry, then remembered his boast when I first met him that he’d never cried a single tear in his life. With that surname Keskinkaya- keskin: sharp, kaya: rock, I could believe it. It was me that did the crying. 

‘My family and your family. Everyone together,’ he’d said. I guess they were my family, the other western teachers, but Kenan and his parents had also welcomed me into their lives; his dad, Aziz, with his mane of swept-back grey hair and throaty chuckle, and his mum, Eda, curly-haired, smiling, always in an apron. All this way to find a family to belong to. And now I had two. 

Of course, there was a third family in North Wales. A mother who winced at the very sight of me. A father whose main sport, apart from the horse racing on TV, was to humiliate me for every perceived failure- not brewing his tea long enough, not being able to light a barbecue, not allowing I could ever be more than him. 

But that Saturday morning, with Kenan’s foot pressed hard to the accelerator, his parents following in their car, Duncan and Paul competing for the worst jokes about Yorkshiremen and sheep, whilst Cathy and Debbie rolled their eyes, it could only be one thing: a family outing. Sunlight dappled the windows to the quirky rhythm of a folk melody as we motored along the quiet highway past roadside shacks stocked with watermelons and plums. Ten miles into the countryside, the dolmuş pulled up outside a ramshackle outbuilding and Kenan beeped the horn. We watched as an old man in a flat cap and half-mast trousers dragged a large sheep towards us.

Kenan jumped out to assist. ‘Up you go, Grandma,’ he said, shoving her huge girth in beside us. Her fur was yellow with age, and she weighed too much for her stick-thin legs. There wasn’t enough room in the footwell for her to lie down. Once we set off again, she tottered in front of us, her eyes bulging with panic. Why wouldn’t she react that way being ripped from her natural environment and forced into a crowd of strangers? We knew we’d be picking up a sheep, but naively imagined Kenan or his father would be towing a trailer. 

Kenan, ever the showman, tried to cajole her. And us. ‘Merhaba. Nasılsın Grandma?’ Her distress first permeated her fur, then leaked all over the footwell. 

‘Poor thing,’ someone tutted. 

I wanted to reach out and touch her, but the fear she might panic more stopped me. So I left her alone. We all did. Pretended she wasn’t there. That she wasn’t shivering and petrified and knew something awful was going to happen. I had the sensation of tunnelling through her fur, of finding my way into her head and calming her agitation. Until a bleating startled me back into my own body from where I watched her twitch uncontrollably. 

A kilometre further up the hill, Kenan parked next to several cars. His parents had arrived moments before us. The instant I slid back the door, Grandma jumped onto the grass in a bid for freedom. Her spindly legs had powered her several metres away before any of us had time to react. I shouted to Kenan who burst into a sprint, leapt on her back, wrestled her to the ground, and secured her in a headlock. Despite my willing Grandma to escape, the capture was over in minutes. There was no outrunning Kenan or his brutality. I watched his father loop a rope around Grandma’s neck and tug. It made her eyes pop. 

I ambled over, shaking his parents’ hands in turn. ‘Merhaba. Siz nasılsınız?’ 

Kenan’s dad beamed. ‘Iyimim. Siz nasılsınız?’

‘Iyiyim, teşekkür ederim,’ I said. Perfectly fine thank you as long as my focus stays off Grandma. 

Kenan and his dad led her away. Duncan and Paul declined the invitation to go with them, instead preferring a quick stroll around the site. Kenan’s mum, Eda, distributed headscarves to us women, explaining the need to be respectful. She helped me tie mine, then fussed around the others ensuring there’d be no slippage. The knot dug into my neck, and I kept having to tuck in wayward strands of hair that were determined to escape. We stood staring at our new selves. ‘We look so different,’ Cathy said, once Eda was out of earshot. 

Debbie nodded. ‘It feels weird. And sad. The whole Grandma thing.’ 

I tried to smile but wanted to cry. ‘It’s just the culture.’ This culture I longed to be part of.

Several minutes passed before Kenan returned grinning, his forehead dotted with beads of sweat. He was brandishing a large knife, its edge covered in dark cherry blood. We stepped back, away from the blade. 

‘You must put some above your nose to bless my dolmuş. It’s tradition for the wife,’ he said, approaching me.

I shrugged. ‘I’m not your wife.’ Even as I said them, the words sounded hollow. 

Invisible fingers prodded me forward. I steadied my hand long enough to dip my finger in the still-warm blood. Just enough pressure on the razor-sharp blade to avoid my platelets mixing with Grandma’s. I anointed my forehead with a splodge. It felt thick like mucus. The crowd moved in for a better look at me and knife-wielding Kenan. The collective murmurs drowned out the pounding of my heart and the urge to wipe Grandma from my forehead. Kenan beamed, uttered a short prayer, and then ambled away to smear the rest of the blood over one of the dolmuş tyres. 

Aussie Jayne grinned. ‘You’re a marked woman, now.’ 

I hadn’t remembered whether Grandma was branded. Maybe they didn’t do that to animals here.

I laughed. ‘You mean a target?’ 

‘Kenan’s hit the bullseye with you, mate.’

Did she mean I was a prize or a prize mug? I didn’t feel much like either, but there was something about being anointed with warm blood that horrified me. A wave of nausea took hold as I imagined it seeping through my skin and staining my brain.

‘Darts – is that even a thing int Oz?’ Duncan’s Yorkshire accent flipped me back west and took my attention from the sign of death on my forehead. 

Cathy sighed. ‘Even today, of all days, Dunc, all you can talk about is sport.’ 

‘Cathy, love, it’s the one-track mind. Us men are all the same.’

I loved the banter, especially Northern banter, but there was something else in Duncan’s words about tracks and minds that resonated. An image of a track splitting, a train heading in a parallel direction. No more than a blur and I quickly forgot about it. I turned my attention to helping Eda unload the picnic gear from their car.

She led the way uphill to a spot beside a stream, offering other families we passed an “Afiyet Olsun” to bless their food. Some preferred full sun, others the shade of Turkish oaks. All were seated around large plastic tablecloths, spread with mounds of bread, meat, and salads. Children danced and skipped, collecting wildflowers and twigs, their laughter ringing out across the field. I wondered what they were celebrating: a new car, a new job, a new house? Had they also sacrificed a sheep, a death for a life transaction? 

We unfurled our red-checked tablecloth over the grass and helped Eda unpack utensils, chopping boards, salad ingredients, bread, cheese, and olives onto the plastic. I knelt beside her and translated as she directed the food preparation. It fell to me to chop a huge mound of flat-leaf parsley as finely as possible. Each scythe of the blade into the tangle of green stalks released a lemon sharpness. I’d been so busy with the food that I hadn’t noticed the men had gathered beneath an oak tree until Kenan shouted across to us for a small knife. 

‘Sure, just a sec,’ I said, hurrying towards them. But the instant I saw her, my limbs froze. Grandma strung up, stiff and skinned, her weight bowing the thick branch. The men milling around, admiring their handiwork. From her neck to her groin was a huge void where her internal organs had been removed and the blood drained from her.

I remembered being eight and having four molars taken out at once. The blood had coursed down my throat from the deep holes in my gums where the dentist had yanked each tooth from its root. Mum had put me to bed with a box of tissues, but the blood, thick and gloopy with saliva, had leaked over the white brushed cotton sheet whilst I was asleep. When she checked on me later, I asked her if I was bleeding to death. She huffed, then walked off, leaving me there alone, too scared to close my eyes. 

And now, almost two decades later, in a field near Adana, seeing Grandma like that scared me. I forced myself to look at her, look at what she’d become. Kenan grabbed the knife and made a small nick in the skin above each of Grandma’s feet. He clamped his mouth around each one and blew her up like a balloon. She looked deformed, like a caricature, her teeth set in a rictus grin. 

‘This way the meat will dry out quicker,’ he said. Once he’d finished, he licked his lips and grabbed me in a bear hug. ‘Your turn now.’

My heart thudded to the sound of the other men laughing as I struggled free. I wanted to run out of the field, onto the main road, anything to get away. Away from the death closing in on me. Except I ran back to the safety of washing and wiping, chopping, and slicing. 

Aussie Jayne had witnessed everything. ‘Neanderthal man, if ever I saw one.’

‘You can’t say that,’ I said as Debbie and Cathy looked on in horror. 

She shrugged. ‘I just did.’ 

Paul and Duncan chuckled, busying themselves with the barbecue. A beggarwoman appeared and Kenan’s father handed her a chunk of meat he’d put aside, explaining it was customary to give to the poor. I nodded, pretending to listen, but the only words in my head were Aussie Jayne’s. ‘What gives you the right to trash Kenan, this culture. You can’t even speak a word of Turkish.’ 

‘I say as I find,’ said Aussie Jayne. ‘You might thank me for it one day.’

I pressed the napkins around the cutlery until my knuckles went white. 

When the coals were red hot, Grandma made her entrance on a large metal tray. She’d been reduced to tiny squares of şiş, which we threaded onto skewers and sprinkled with cumin and paprika. My hands felt clammy around Grandma’s flesh. As I laid her over the grill, I shivered despite the sun beating down on us. I watched the fat spit and sizzle out of her in those final moments and brushed away a tear. 

Growing up in Wales, of course I knew that the sheep frolicking in the fields around me were destined for the dinner plate. But there was no blessing, no participation in ritual slaughter, nothing to acknowledge the succulent lamb I’d tuck into on special occasions had once had blood in its veins and lived and breathed the same as I did. 

The transition from life to death brought to mind the only funeral I’d ever been to. A school friend’s mum’s when I was fourteen. How I’d stared at my friend’s black clothes and the dark shadows under her eyes. I hadn’t wanted to go, I’d never even met the woman, but not to do seemed disrespectful. The sobs only erupted once I got home. When Mum asked me what was wrong, and I told her, she said “Oh” and looked right through me. Like I was a ghost, devoid of flesh and blood. As if I was the one who had died and not my younger brother. 

He had a hole in his heart and only lived six months. I was nine when a photo tumbled out of her black leather clutch bag; the one she kept all her important documents in, the child benefit books and utility bills. The picture was of a tiny sleeping baby wrapped in a blanket. 

‘He looks small,’ I’d said, wondering whether his eyes were blue like mine. 

My mother sighed, her fingers stroking the surface of the black and white image as though smoothing his forehead. ‘He was perfect in every way.’ 

Neither my mother nor father ever spoke of him again. About the love they would have lavished on him, the success he would have made of his life. 

All these years later, death was a celebration of Kenan’s new dolmuş, and a hope for prosperity. Grandma had been sacrificed for a worthy cause. We toasted her journey into the afterlife with beer and rakı. Yet, as I chewed down on her, all I could taste at the back of my throat was blood. 

My eyes roved around the red-checked tablecloth at the familiar faces of people I cared about and who cared about me. Polite smiles, murmurs of how delicious the salad was, the barbecue-warmed pide bread so soft and fluffy. Eda sat on a cushion beside me, her cheeks pink with pride. Aziz, as ever, radiated kindness and humility. Even Kenan munched away in silence. When Eda squeezed my hand, her touch ignited a spark of long-forgotten emotion. I tilted my head upwards and felt the life-affirming warmth of the autumn sun.

Amid the lull in conversation was a voice. Gentle, Turkish, and right beside me. Eda’s. At first hesitant, it suddenly gathered momentum and volume. Some familiar words and phrases, but Kenan translated them anyway. ‘Mum says there is a famous cave here. Only women can go in. If you find a pebble and it sticks to the holy rock, you’ll have a happy life.’ 

We clapped our thanks to Eda, savouring this new morsel of insight and culture. A flash of delight darted across her face, then a flurry of plate clearing signalled a return to the natural order of things. When we asked if she’d take us to the cave, she tutted a no.

Cathy looked disappointed. ‘Does that mean we can’t go? Foreign women aren’t allowed?’

I had to smile. Tutting was something I’d learned when I first arrived in Ankara. That and the flick of the eyebrows. I remembered walking into a shop and asking for something they didn’t stock. Getting the tuts and eyebrows by way of response. Repeating myself. Slower, clearer. Same reaction. Storming back to school. How dare they ignore me! Colleagues smirking. ‘It’s nothing personal. Just another way of saying no.’

And here, months later, was Eda just saying no. Kenan squeezed her shoulder. ‘Too many steps for Mum, değil mi?’

But not for us. Eda and Aziz wished us luck and Cathy pecked Duncan on the cheek before racing ahead with Kenan. I walked alongside Aussie Jayne and Debbie towards the prospect of a happy life. If it could get any happier. 

Kenan led us through thistles and sheep droppings towards the outer edge of the field to the base of a limestone outcrop. Tiny sage-green rosettes nestled in its crevices, some with streamers like a bride’s posy. From the depths of the cave came muffled women’s voices, getting louder to the right where we discovered the entrance. Kenan tried to peer down the rough-hewn slabs which led underground. 

‘Women only, mate,’ said Aussie Jayne barricading herself across the narrow opening blocking his view. Annoyance flashed in his eyes. Women excluding men. How was that even a thing in Turkey? He clicked his neck, then motored off towards the picnic area, legs and arms pumping in anger. 

Aussie Jayne hooted with laughter. ‘Did you know you were dating a wind-up toy?’

 ‘You’re the bloody wind-up,’ I said, pulling a face. But she was right. Kenan’s fuse was shorter than a match. ‘Save your energy, the pair of you. This looks serious,’ said Cathy, the freckles on her nose twitching as she stepped inside. Debbie took her sunglasses off and stashed them in her small tan leather shoulder bag before following Cathy. Next was Aussie Jayne with me at the rear. I paused at the entrance feeling a blast of chill air. Would my future really be revealed down there? By a pebble? A ridiculous notion, but my skin still prickled with anxiety. I hurried in after Aussie Jayne.