Sleeping Around (27 page)

Aylin's mum told me that I had to eat. ‘Just a little bit,' I groaned, patting my ever-expanding stomach. ‘I've eaten so much food on this trip.' (Although my bulging waistline was probably more of a consequence of beer rather than food.) My ‘little bit' was a plate piled high with spicy meatballs in tomato sauce, baked stuffed eggplant, pasta and rice.

‘So, are you nervous about the wedding?' I asked Aylin with a mouthful of stuffed eggplant.

‘A little bit,' she said musingly. She then showed me a red rash and splotches all up her arm. ‘This is from the stress,' she sighed wearily. ‘We really have made it hard on ourselves. As well as the wedding to organise, we're moving into the new flat and, to top it off, the deadline for the latest magazine is in three days.'

I asked Aylin what happens at a traditional Turkish wedding and she said that theirs wasn't going to be very traditional at all. ‘There will be three stages,' Aylin said. ‘First there is an official ceremony which is very short. It is so short that I missed a wedding a few weeks ago. The official ceremony started at seven. When I arrived at three minutes past, the ceremony was over. After the ceremony we will eat a meal with the family and then we're having a party with two hundred guests and we'll all get trashed.'

‘Then we are having our honeymoon in Iceland,' James said excitedly.

‘Oh, I was there a week ago,' I said.

‘Do you have any recommendations?' Aylin asked.

‘Yeah, double the limit on your credit card.'

After lunch we all squeezed into a taxi to go to James's nanna's place for a family get-together—except for Aylin's mum, who still had a little bit more space in the fridge to fill up with meals.

‘We used to love this day when we were kids,' James said. ‘When you kiss the hand of a relative, they give you money and we used to make loads.'

James also had an ulterior motive for making sure he caught up with all of his relatives. ‘We want to be in the good books,' James said with a cheeky grin. ‘So we get good wedding presents.'

It sounds like they do all right in the wedding gift stakes. Aylin said that she would also get gold pinned to her dress on the wedding day. ‘It used to be money,' James said. ‘But the Turkish Lira devalues too quickly.'

James's mum Julie (or Jool-ay as she pronounced it) met us at Nanna's door and there were hugs and kisses all round. Julie had a broad Yorkshire accent and she jumped effortlessly from rapid-fire Turkish to ‘Ey oop'. As each relative greeted us, we were given handfuls of chocolates and sweets.

James introduced me to his brother John who was hanging halfway out of an open window smoking a cigarette. John's accent was even stronger than James and Julie's. He had been working in Leeds for the past three years as a stonemason for a Turkish company that also had an office and factory in Istanbul.

The only reason he'd moved to Leeds was so he didn't have to do a long stint in the military. ‘If you go to university, like James did,' he said, ‘then you only have to do five months instead of fifteen months. I didn't want to do fifteen months, so I had to work abroad for three years. Then I only had to do twenty-one days military service.' John hadn't been able to come home to Turkey in that time. He returned to Turkey three years to the day after he'd left.

‘I also had to pay for it, though,' he grumbled. ‘To only do twenty-one days, I had to pay four thousand pounds.'

When some more relatives arrived, they stared at John in wonder. ‘Everyone keeps staring at me,' he said. ‘Before I left to do my military service I had long hair and a beard.' John, who had only finished his service the day before, was now clean-shaven and sporting short-cropped hair. ‘I also lost a stone in weight,' he said as Nanna handed him a massive slice of cream cake. I think John may have been on a mission to put it all back on, though. When he'd devoured the cake he had a second serve that was bigger than the first.

‘Are you going to move back to Turkey?' I asked John.

‘No, I'll stay in England,' John said. ‘That way I get the best of both worlds.'

I didn't want to be rude, but I wasn't sure how Leeds could be the best of any world.

‘So, are you ready to go out?' James asked after I'd finished my third cup of tea.

‘Right, let's go out and get fookin' pissed,' John said, rubbing his hands. Yes, I think John had turned English.

‘Asia is boring, so we're going to Europe,' John said as we jumped in a taxi to the wharf. We were catching a ferry from Asia back to Europe.

‘The city goes a bit crazy tonight,' James said aboard the ferry. ‘There will be a million people in the streets that haven't had a drink for a month.'

The view from the ferry as we chugged across the Bosphorus was striking. Under the blanket of night the modern city took on its historic mantle as ancient mosques, including the imposing
Yeni Cami
mosque (which James informed me means New Mosque, even though it was built in 1663), and the old city walls were spectacularly illuminated with not quite so historic coloured lights.

We walked over Galata Bridge, constantly side-stepping the crowds. Scores of men were selling silvery fish displayed in baskets, while hundreds more lined the railings of the bridge fishing between the ferries. At the far end of the bridge, along the water's edge, a long line of charcoal barbecues was cooking the fresh fish that had just been caught. Not sure ‘fresh' is the right word, though, and I think the fish themselves are probably thankful for their release from the dank and polluted waters of the Bosphorus. There were also folk cooking kebabs, pretzels, pancakes, mussels and corn on the cob.

We sauntered into ‘Old Stamboul' and caught the world's second-oldest subway (after London's). We did the entire system, which is all of one stop. It did save us a walk up a very steep hill, though. When we stepped out of the station, we were immediately swept up among the throngs of revellers roaming up and down the traffic-free main street.

‘All the foockin' idiots from the suburbs come into town after Ramadan,' John declared. We headed off the main drag and down a quiet narrow cobblestone lane, which was lined with hip bars with tables spilling out into the street. We grabbed an outside table and ordered large mugs of Efes Pilsen (on this trip alone, I think I'd sampled enough different beers to rival Smári's impressive list).

Over the next hour a whole gang of friends turned up to join us, including John's two new best friends from his short military stint. Neither of them lived in Turkey, though. One was German and the other lived a few kilometres away from me in Melbourne. Buyruk emigrated with his family to Australia when he was eight and he'd come back to live and work in Turkey for twelve months. For that privilege he had to do his military service and pay AU$8500.

‘We had an American guy in our regiment who did military service so he could get his father's inheritance,' John told us. ‘He didn't speak a word of Turkish, so the guys in our regiment taught him complicated swear words. He couldn't ask where the toilet was in Turkish, but he could say “I'm going to pour concrete into your mother's pussy, so I can't fuck her and neither can your father”.'

Clearly, compulsory military service is a character-building experience and bolsters national pride.

‘Did they do the fasting thing in the military?' I asked John.

‘Nah, we'd be foockin' knackered if we did.'

The danger of becoming knackered seemed to be the main reason why most of James and Aylin's friends didn't fast during Ramadan. ‘I did the whole Ramadan thing when I was young,' Aylin said. ‘But not anymore. I'm too busy working too hard. You can't work without eating or drinking anything for twelve hours, you have no energy.'

‘New Year is really the biggest day in Turkey,' James said. ‘People put up Christmas trees with Santa Claus decorations and the devoted Muslims hate it.'

All the bars in the street were now busy with locals boozing up with abandon.

‘I thought Muslims didn't drink,' I said to James.

‘We are Muslim,' James shrugged. ‘But we like to drink.'

‘Turkey even has a ban on women wearing a burka,' Aylin said. ‘It is forbidden by law for female politicians, lawyers, public servants and tertiary students to wear the veil in their place of work or study.'

The Muslim women of Turkey may not wear traditional veils, but they seemed to follow the Muslim doctrine of staying at home. When we went to another bar I noticed that at least 80 per cent of the people roaming the streets were men.

By the wee hours in the morning, only James, John and I were left as we sipped raki in a lovely rooftop bar looking out across the city. ‘Let's get something to eat,' John suggested when we finished our drinks. We were in the right city for the perfect fodder after a few beers. And it wouldn't matter how drunk you were, you wouldn't have any trouble finding a kebab. Every second shop in Taksim Square was selling them. ‘I know someone,' John said, tapping his nose. ‘So we can get freebies.' I was quite excited as I took in the delicious smell of grilled meats that permeated the square.

‘Here ya go,' John said. Much to my disappointment, John had come back with hamburgers.

I didn't get to try out my luxurious ‘couch' at James's apartment because his mum's apartment was easier (‘and a lot foockin' cheaper' John said) to get to. James gave me his old bedroom and it wasn't until I woke up in the morning that I realised what a lovely gesture that was. James had slept on the floor in John's bedroom on a pile of lumpy cushions.

‘This is our office,' James announced as we stepped into the courtyard at the back of a cafe. ‘They have wireless connection here and this is also where we do most of our interviews for the magazine.' The cafe was below their old flat and James told me that they spent more time working at the cafe than at their real office.

‘This was an expensive area in the seventies,' Aylin said as we grabbed a table. ‘Then drug addicts moved in and it became rundown. Now it's cool again.'

Too cool, according to James. ‘All the
Sex and the City
wannabes are moving in now.'

I burst out laughing. ‘The guy I stayed with in Chicago said
exactly
the same thing about where he lived.'

We had a traditional Turkish breakfast, which James and Aylin had most mornings. I was surprised James and Aylin were so slim when I saw how much food came out. We were served an array of plates that were piled high with cheeses,
sucuk
(spicy Turkish sausage), olives, sun-dried tomatoes, green peppers,
reçel
(a preserve made with whole fruits), cucumbers, tomatoes,
simit
(a circular roll with sesame seeds) and a huge omelette for each of us, served in a sizzling pan with cheese and tomato.

After our morning feast we went to the less-cafe-style offices of
bant
, which they shared with the same computer games magazine they'd been working for when they first met. James and Aylin had five full-time staff: an illustrator, advertising sales rep, designer and two writers. I left James and Aylin frantically typing away to go do the tourist thing. James did have one of piece of advice for me. ‘Beware of men wearing fezzes,' he warned. ‘If you go to a restaurant or shop and they are wearing fezzes then it's only for tourists.'

Only a short walk from the
bant
office is the most visited site in Istanbul:
ve Ticaret Merkezi
—in English, the Cevahir Shopping Centre. It is also the biggest shopping mall in Europe (and third largest in the world after South China Mall in Beijing and West Edmonton Mall in Canada). Yes, it was a mammoth mall of monumental proportions, but it looked like any other mall in the world, with the same mega-global brands. And like malls the world over, the place was teeming with teenagers—guys with an overabundance of hair product and girls with an overabundance of makeup— loitering about eating Macca's and texting each other. Naturally I got lost in there, and in hindsight it probably wasn't such a good idea to come to a shopping centre with hundreds and hundreds of shops when all I wanted to buy was a pack of chewing gum.