I had left the hotel, wandered through a maze of small streets and, by the time I had tried a hundred different ways to square the damned circle, I found myself at the beach. It was late afternoon and still warm – the last flicker of summer before autumn really blew in.
I sat on a bench and looked across the foreign sea, turquoise and almost other-worldly in its brilliance. A father was splashing water with his three kids in the narrow zone where the water met the sand. Their laughter filled the air and, from there, it was only a small step for me to start musing about a little boy who had no father to splash water with and didn’t even know what Down’s syndrome was.
The kids’ mother walked close to take a photograph of her children just as I was thinking about Cumali and the quiet heartbreak she must have experienced when she saw the telltale single crease across the palm of her newborn baby’s hand and realized that he was the one in seven hundred.
The whole world seemed to slow: the glittering water from the kids’ buckets hung suspended in the air, the father’s laughing face barely seemed to move, the mother’s hand froze on the shutter. My mind had run aground on a strange thought.
Evidence is the name we give to what we have, but what about the things we haven’t found? Sometimes the things that are missing are of far greater importance.
In all the time I had spent searching Cumali’s apartment I hadn’t seen one photo of her with the baby. There were none of her with him as a newborn on her desk, not one of her playing with him as a toddler and no portraits on the wall. I hadn’t found any in the drawers and I had seen none in frames beside her bed. Why would you keep an album of photographs of a failed marriage and have nothing of you as a family or of the little guy as a baby? Weren’t they the things mothers always kept? Unless …
He wasn’t her child.
Still the water hung in the air, the mother kept the camera to her face and the father was caught in the middle of laughing. I wondered why I hadn’t considered it before: she had arrived with her son in Bodrum three years previously with her husband left far behind and no friends or acquaintances to contradict her. She could have told people whatever story she wanted.
And if he wasn’t her child, whose was he?
The water fell to the ground, the mother took her photograph, the father threw a splash of water back at his kids and I started to run.
It was dinner time and I figured if I was fast enough I could get to Cumali’s house before she did the washing-up.
Chapter Sixty-eight
CUMALI OPENED THE door wearing a casual shirt, a pair of jeans and an oven mitt. As she wasn’t expecting any visitors, she had dispensed with the scarf and tied her hair back in a ponytail – I have to say it suited her, accentuating her high cheekbones and large eyes, and I was struck again by how attractive she was.
She didn’t appear embarrassed about being seen with her hair uncovered and a shirt open at the throat, merely pissed off at being disturbed at home.
‘What do you want?’ she asked.
‘Your help,’ I replied. ‘May I come in?’
‘No – I’m busy, I’m just about to serve dinner.’
I was ready to start arguing – to be as insistent as necessary – but I was saved the trouble. The little guy emerged from the kitchen, saw me and started to run. Calling happily in Turkish, he came to a halt, gathered himself together and gave a perfect bow.
‘Very good,’ I said, laughing.
‘It ought to be – he’s been practising every day,’ Cumali said, her voice softening, pushing some wayward strands of the little guy’s hair back into place.
‘It’ll only take a few minutes,’ I said, and after a pause she stepped back, letting me in – more for her son, if that’s what he was, than from any desire to help me.
I walked down the corridor ahead of them, making sure to look around, curious, as if I had never been in the house before. The little guy was right behind, chatting away in Turkish, demanding that his mom translate.
‘He wants to take you on a picnic,’ she said. ‘He saw a programme on TV about an American boy. Apparently, that’s what best friends do.’
I didn’t joke – it meant everything to the child. ‘A picnic? Of course,’ I said, stopping to bend down to him. ‘Any time you want – that’s a promise.’
We stepped into the kitchen and, using her oven mitt, she went to the stove and pulled a tagine – a Moroccan casserole pot – off the heat, tasted its contents with a short wooden spoon and served herself and her son. She didn’t offer me any – a real affront in the Muslim world, where, due to the prohibition on alcohol, most hospitality revolved around food – and it was clear she wanted to be rid of me as soon as possible.