Read a Short Extract
One
I grabbed a cup of coffee and the morning papers and settled into my chair by the window. It’s my morning ritual. I drink only two cups of coffee a day. The first, always in the morning. Mind you, what I call “morning” is what ordinary people refer to as “the afternoon”. I go to bed late. For I am, as they say, “a creature of the night”.
A news item on page three hit me like a slap in the face.
“Transvestite Burned to Death”.
I got a sour taste in my mouth. Naturally, it affected the flavour of my coffee: the last mouthful was distinctly bitter. Putting down my cup, I concentrated on reading the article. Bad news about our girls always gets me down. Not all of them enjoy a life of leisure like me. Some of them make a living out on the streets. It can make them tough and hostile.
For many reasons, the number of our dead is on the rise. Life gets more difficult with each passing day; petty crime is rife; our girls are growing careless; everyone’s out of control and violence is spreading. The price of life is cheaper than ever. And as for our girls, they’re getting knocked off for a handful of change.
Many of the girls working the highway have been hit-and-run victims. The sense of security they got from working in large groups turned out to be a false one. The end, when it came, was sudden. And bitter.
Just like my coffee when I saw the news.
This time, the tone of the tabloid was especially demeaning and nasty. Exactly what you’d expect from page three. As always, they ran an old picture of the victim as a man. In other words, someone less colourful and lively than the person we all knew. What’s more, it was an unflattering picture from an identity card. A transvestite called Ceren. I didn’t really know her; she didn’t hang out at our club. Her real name was Ibrahim Karaman. And she was only twenty-three.
I quickly scanned the report from start to finish. She died in a fire in her apartment in Tarlabasi. Fortunately, no one else lives in the abandoned building. The fire company suspects faulty wiring or a smouldering cigarette butt.
Our girls have the survival instincts of wolves. They seem immune to disaster and can cope with just about anything. But like everyone else, when they are drunk or doped up they might sleep through a fire. That’s probably what happened. I felt a sharp pan, thinking about how someone so young, in the spring of her life, had been cut down in her prime. Had she ever even fully savoured the joys of being a transvestite?
I tossed aside the paper and stared blankly at the street below. A series of images flashed through my mind: the faces of all the girls we’d lost. I can’t think of a single transvestitie who has died of natural causes. Foul play is always involved. And the police invariably record the deaths as unsolved crimes. If murder can’t be proved, our girls are always blamed. That’s how the press treated this particular case: a fire broke out in the home of a drunken vagrant, a stoned transvestite. And he died. I silently cursed them all. But it didn’t help. I was still furious.
After a while, I forced myself to snap out of it. Life goes on, despite the pain. And I had a lot of work to do. Most urgently, I was due to have my legs waxed. Fatos abla is an elderly transvestite. Before becoming too decrepit, and in order to avoid – in her words – “becoming a spectacle”, she had taken up a new career. Fatos abla goes from house to house, waxing shoulders, plucking eyebrows and even giving the odd hormone injection to those who require one.
I was born with shapely eyebrows. I have never resorted to hormones, and have no intention of doing so. I glory in being both Man and Woman. As for waxing…it is a basic and constant necessity.
Fatos abla has the gift of the gab. Her clients roar with laughter as she regales them with tales of her younger days, then scream in pain as she uproots unwanted body hair. Even though I’ve been having my legs done for years, and my arms and bottom depilated on occasion, it still hurts every time, and my eyes always fill with tears. Fatos abla teases “Well, it’s not easy; all that manly bristle.” While men with dark complexions have coarse hair, fair-skinned types like me are usually covered in down. At least, that’s what I’m like. My light complexion may make me more sensitive to pain. Anyway, all I know is that I sometimes scream silently, and at other times like a banshee.
Fatos abla rang the bell right on time. The older she gets, the less trouble she takes with her make-up and appearance. As a result, she looks strangely ordinary. If I passed her in the street, I’d describe her as a big woman with strong features. She was wearing a simple short-sleeved dress, printed with large roses on a cream background. Draped over one shoulder was an enormous straw handbag, and on her feet were low-heeled leather sandals, one size too small. As always, her toes and heels overflowed. The effect was completed by an old-fashioned straw hat, trimmed with a swathe of fabric matching her dress. Her eyes were hidden behind oversized dark-tinted glasses. At one time, she no doubt paid a small fortune for them.
As she laid out the tools of her trade, I undressed. I chose some music to ease the pain and drown out my cries: a CD compilation of old Turkish pop hits that a friend had made for me. Every half-remembered song from the late ‘60s and early ‘70s is there. I love singing along with the ones I remember the words to. Fatos abla knows them all by heart, and dredges up long-forgotten showbiz scandals she has read about in the gutter press. Our session started off light-heartedly enough.
The first song is “Birazcik Yuz Ver (Pay a Little Attention to Me)”, a rhythmic number by Gonul Turgut, someone I greatly admire as a woman, as well as an artiste.
Fatos was off and running.
“Gonul Turgut was the greatest singer of her time, you know. Even Ajda Pekkan used to imitate her when she first came out.”
“Whatever happened to her?”
“She gave up music when she got married. What a waste of talent. And a shame for music, too.”
“She was an alto. Just like us,” I threw in.
“How dare you!” she bellowed. “No one talks about my Gonul Turgut like that. How can you compare a foghorn to a voice like hers? Just listen!”
As she spoke, she stripped off another patch of hair, deliberately provoking a loud scream and deftly underlining her point.
We got idle chatter about singers and their lives out of the way. It was time to talk about the morning news of Ceren’s fiery death. Fatos abla had heard about it too. As she applied warm wax to my leg, she began.
“But Ceren never lived there. Her apartment’s in Cihangir, near Taksim. Right behind the German Hospital. I waxed her legs often enough to know.”
“What do you mean? That she didn’t die at home?”
Reproduced by permission of the publishers Serpents Tail
Copyright © Mehmet Murat Somer