Chapter 7
Ayvalik, Turkey
So, in the end it’s he and not she who winds up crossing the narrow strip of the Aegean Sea, hurrying from Greek Lesvos to Ayvalik on the Turkish side.
He stands on the deck as the ferry pulls into the bay, looking at the two once-Byzantine churches now turned mosques that top the hill above the harbour.
His hands are clenched on the railing and have been for most of the journey.
He will find it so hard to fully unclench them when the boat docks that he will walk down the gangway and hail a taxi with hands that are still half-fist. Right now, he is praying to any gods who might, despite his lifelong scepticism about their existence, be out there listening to ensure she has survived surgery.
The taxi takes him straight to the hospital where he stands for a moment looking up at the freestanding letters perched on the roof of the glass frontage, reading AYVALIK DEVLET HASTANESI in a bright red shout of colour silhouetted against a blue sky making a contrast he finds almost offensive in its beauty given the horror he is caught up in.
He finds it hard to tear his eyes off it and realises it’s because he is wondering if this is the last happy thing he will ever see once he goes inside and gets the bad news.
He shakes himself and pushes through the glass doors.
She has survived. The driver and the other passenger were not so lucky.
The explosion he heard on the phone call was not from a gun or a roadside IED.
It was the front tyre hitting a particularly severe pothole at speed and bursting, which flipped the car.
It is good, the doctor tells him, that she was in the back seat and wearing a belt.
They let him sit with her, but she is too woozy with morphine and shock to do more than grip his hand as tears leak from both their eyes.
She drifts off and he falls asleep beside her.
It is the next day before they talk and the day after that before the talking makes sense.
He cancels all his plans, tells work he is staying with her until she can come home, and does exactly that.
On the third or fourth day he is sitting with her just holding her hand and watching as the sun travels across the side wall of the room and remembers something.
“What were you going to tell me?” he says.
“I can’t remember,” she says. “Was I going to tell you something?”
“I thought so,” he says. “Maybe I was wrong”
She nods.
“More water?” she says.
He takes the glass and unscrews the plastic bottle, taking care not to spill any as he pours it into a cup with a straw in it.
“I’m parched,” she says and then lets him put the straw between her lips.
He looks out of the window as she drinks, one hand helping her hold the glass, the other resting lightly on her shoulder. In the distance they hear a muezzin broadcasting the call to prayer.
She tells him she wants to go home. Now.
He says they should wait until she’s stronger.
She tells him she just needs to go home.
She tells him she’ll heal better at home, and she tells him she knows it’s irrational, magic thinking but she tells him she doesn’t want to stay another day in this hot dusty country that kicked up and split her face open and killed her friends.
She doesn’t tell him she was, unbelievably, in a vanishingly rare exception to the grim statistics attending the Gelding, pregnant.
She keeps that to herself because he doesn’t need to carry the pain of the loss, of the so-near-yet-so-far, of the almost-but-not-actually.
And because she doesn’t tell him, he thinks she didn’t know, and so doesn’t tell her the doctors told him she had lost the child, a thing so small it was not really a child at all, just the miraculous promise of one.
He in his turn thinks she doesn’t need to bear that pain on top of the injuries she is going to have to cope with for the rest of their lives.
And then one of the nurses, a kind-faced middle-aged woman who speaks English comes up beside him as he waits in line at the hospital café and tells him quietly that there are doctors coming in from Haceteppe University in Ankara, to see the Girl.
It’s a protocol. All pregnancies, even brutally truncated ones, now trigger a statutory notification to the government, in the same way certain much less rare infectious diseases do.
She tells him they will be there after the weekend, having been delayed by the earthquake that just rolled through central Anatolia.
Because he’s still groggy with shock and lack of sleep he hadn’t heard about it, and doesn’t get the significant look she gives him before she walks off.
He goes looking for her and finds her in a corridor outside the nurse’s station, pushing a rattling trolley of afternoon medications for the ward. She looks both ways before answering his question, a furtive gesture that sits uncomfortably on her normally kindly face.
“The team is from Haceteppe which is our top Medical University. But the place they take the pregnant ones is not Haceteppe. They take them to a closed ward in the Gülhane Academy.”
“Take her?” he says.
“If she was my daughter, I would not want her to be a laboratory rat in a foreign country,” she says. “Gülhanne is a Military Medical Academy.”
The Girl is happy he comes back from the cafeteria having changed his mind and agreeing they should go home now, if she can bear the discomfort of travel.
He doesn’t tell her why he caved. He’s still respecting her silence, though if asked he probably couldn’t quite explain why he felt the need to do that when openness would have been cleaner.
Besides which, there’s suddenly a lot to do and he can’t think straight enough to know where to begin.
She’s always said that ends come much faster than anyone expects, and certainly travel from Turkey back to London seemed to be getting harder and harder to arrange.
Flights, already a high-priced luxury for most people, had suddenly become eye-wateringly expensive yet still almost impossible to find a seat on.
Partly this was because of what was happening in Africa, a lot of it was to do with the Chinese situation and the way in which that was – in an almost inconceivable cascade of unintended consequences – affecting both oil-supply from the Gulf and the availability of trained aircraft maintenance crews.
And of course, one of the inadvertent and paradoxical results of the tumbling dominoes was that travelling by plane was not only becoming more expensive but was less safe anyway.
Airlines collapsed into each other and consolidated their resources in a last-ditch effort to make the most of the dwindling supply of ground crew and pilots.
In fact, though they didn’t know it at the time, scheduled international air travel was less than two years away from effective collapse.
In the end he rented a car, walked her out of the ward at night when the nurses were elsewhere, without a word to anyone and drove her straight to Istanbul, from where a stitchwork of train journeys threaded their way back to Calais and one of the increasingly dilapidated daily ferries which rolled them queasily home across a choppy and unsettled English Channel, travelling light but each, unknown to the other, carrying their own heavy baggage of secret pain and worry.
“It was just bad luck,” he said, conscious of how useless this observation was likely to be. “Bad luck happens to good people too. If bad luck only happened to bad people… well, it wouldn’t be bad luck at all. It’d be—”
“Karma” she said.
“Yes,” he said. “Maybe—”
“So, it’s just random” she said. “Bad luck.”
“I think so” he said, after a bit. “Yes.”
“Doesn’t feel random,” she said, looking at the scars. “Feels fucking personal.”