The Turkish Trap: A tense and intriguing action thriller.

by Jack Dylan

  “Lot of bollocks really,” tested the spotted one, who was just as much a product of his schooling, his family, and his peer pressures as any convent graduate. Plenty of bad language, one or two pints at lunchtime, and the flourishing of roll-your-own cigarettes, were the badges of struggling maleness, which needed just as desperately some romantic and sexual experiences to bolster the fragile self-image.

  “Is that what you’re going to write?” she surprised herself by asking.

  “Yeah. Why not?” The uncertain bravado persisted.

  “Well I don’t think you’ll get too many marks for it, unless you can back it up with some literary arguments.”

  “Yeah, well, I’ll have to see if I can think of some won’t I,” said the lamely retreating youth.

  “Did you really not like it?” Sinead decided to help him along.

  “To tell you the truth I haven’t really read it yet. Bloody thing’s due in tomorrow and I don’t know what to write.”

  “I’ve got some notes you could borrow if you’re really stuck,” she found herself offering. She hadn’t thought it out, she didn’t fancy him at all, but some philanthropic recognition of another inadequate soul prompted her gesture of kindness and support.

  Unfortunately Sinead had limited insight into the mental gyrations of male prisoners of hormones, peers, and bar-room expectations. The average ex-boarding school male had been finely tuned to read sexual meanings and possibilities into every innocent word, look, or gesture.

  “What are you doing later?” made perfect sense as a response in the mind of the testosterone driven hopeful. To Sinead it was illogical, bizarre, unwelcome, frightening, and strangely welcome all at once.

  “I’ll give you a hand with the essay if you like,” made perfect sense to her charitable nature. She didn’t know that it could possibly be heard as an open invitation to a sexual encounter of the fumbling embarrassed kind, carried out in the darkness of the stairwell to someone’s rooms in Botany Bay. The furtive, tongue-pushing, roughly inexperienced grasping of her breasts, which led to an alternating sequence of exploring hands slipping up under her woollen jumper to feel the shape of her white innocent bra, grasped by the wrist and forced to retreat, only to be replaced by a hand lifting her skirt and running up her cringing thigh.

  “Stop it! I mean it!” she whispered urgently.

  She rejected the next invitation from the spotty undergraduate to help him with an essay. Sitting quietly in her room she knew she wasn’t desperate enough to tolerate his unattractiveness, his beery smoky breath, and the juvenile inadequacy of his range of social responses. It didn’t take her long to work out that the attention she attracted from him was entirely lustful. He saw her as a potential conquest – his long-awaited ticket to the camaraderie of the knowing looks and smug self-satisfaction of the sexually experienced. Her brief encounter was enough to persuade her that she should bide her time.

  As the end of her degree started to loom, Sinead was devastated to find how few career opportunities there were for her. The so-called milk round of employers visiting the university in spring of their final year provided a harsh set-back to her increasing awareness of the need to do something. The awareness had always been there in the background. In the early days of university, conversations sometimes drifted into career plans. In first year it was easy to be as vague as most of the other students. In second year it was increasingly difficult to completely ignore the question. By third year it was as if the student body was undergoing a self-determined amoebic split into those who knew what they wanted to do, and those who had no clear path. Socially and academically the groups mixed and interacted, but by final year it was easy to discern which students had identified their desired career path and which were wallowing.

  The wallowers developed sophisticated coping mechanisms. As a group they displayed mutually supportive disdain for the business-studies, engineering, medicine, and dentistry students, who generally knew what they were heading for.

  “Well really,” went one particularly comforting line, “it isn’t as if we were in a training college. This is a University for goodness’ sake – supposed to be an education broadening the whole person, not just preparing you to do the books in some boring office.”

  They could all nod and agree with the warm, vaguely worthwhile nature of a broad education. They agreed on the necessity to experience the world more fully before settling in to some career that would present itself when the time came. The Gap Year companies were flourishing as more and more were drawn by the prospect of travelling the world, and innocently working in some cynically disguised money-making scheme that was posing as a voluntary project with altruistic intentions.

  Sinead in her sensible shoes kept her feet on the ground. She took the failure to get past first interviews in the milk round as a valuable piece of data. If she wasn’t attractive now to all these big companies was she going to be any more attractive a year later? She lowered her sights and enrolled in a secretarial course made more palatable by being called ‘Business Administration’. Most of the other students were graduates like her, facing the reality of the relative uselessness of their degrees. They were able to conspire together to find consolation in their shared experience. They agreed that they were the practical ones who would be able to demonstrate their competence, and would be recognised as people with organisational and managerial potential. In the meantime, learning to file, to create business letters, to master double-entry book-keeping and to share time on what was in 1996 a scarce resource – the college computer – was a demeaning but necessary stage in life.

  Sinead by her late twenties had almost abandoned her optimism about finding either the right job or the right man. She lived in a flat she shared with three similarly aged, similarly disappointed women – who of course referred to one-another as ‘the girls’. She had been in three secretarial and administrative jobs, two in small Dublin companies whose promises of future prospects were as thin as the boss’s receding hair. She had finally managed to secure a better-sounding job in the university administration department, where she felt more at home, more respectable, and dangerously settled.

  She became one of those sensibly skirted and stoutly shod untouchables, who gravitate together and repeat the cycle from their early student days of adopting a social grouping and habit that is at the same time comforting (because they are all in the same boat) and totally self-defeating (as they become less and less likely to attract a romantic advance from a male). She became one of the habitual spinsters who sequester themselves in their favourite corner of the coffee bar and share their home-made biscuits. It didn’t take long for the first knitting bag to appear, that final step that seals the spinsterhood identity, and ensures that approaches from males will be impossible. The knitting bag is an inviolable symbol that shrieks ‘no males at this table’. It only takes one person in the group, but as soon as the step is taken, all those who persist in advertising themselves as adherents to the group are lost souls in the romantic lottery. Their number is no longer in the hat. Their age is immaterial as they might as well be senile. They descend into the strange social ostracism of the untouchable spinster, and carry the badge that every man recognises as he turns away. ‘The Girls’ are a life sentence.

  For some unaccountable reason, all this started to become clear to Sinead. To be more accurate, for some reason Sinead allowed her conscious mind to perceive and understand what she knew was happening. It was clear at some level to all the participants, and they all had their preferred strategies for ignoring, denying, or confusing the issue.

  Something in Sinead’s psyche wouldn’t allow her to deny the process any longer. Perhaps it was something she read; perhaps it was the businesslike straightforwardness that she had learned to cultivate. When she applied it to an appraisal of herself on the eve of her thirtieth birthday she felt a bursting frustration and disappointment that at last transformed itself into an energetic determination to ‘do something’. Too often
the frustration and disappointment had cried out only to be drowned in comforting swathes of avoidance. Too much comfort food; too many escapist books; too many retreats to the mutually-supportive sharing of sisterhood littered her last few years of apathetic acceptance of her status.

  She looked around with a new intention. While not wanting to ditch the friendships that she had built up at work and in the flat, she knew that she needed to inject some radically new elements into her life. Sinead was good at her job. Despite her traditionally arts oriented education, and the complete absence of scientific instruction, she had found that she was good with figures. She was able to see sense in columns of numbers, quickly estimate relationships, and intuitively spot errors in calculations. More surprisingly she had found herself attracted by the logical simplicity that lay behind the apparent complexity of the computer programmes they used. She had quietly become the person that others turned to for advice when the software surprised and baffled them. She could format documents better than anyone in the office and was the only one who could set up a spreadsheet faster than the supposed experts in accounts. On top of all that of this she knew fundamentally and without a doubt that she could do more. She could organise, and was frustrated by the inability of those who were paid to organise and manage to do just that. So she did a lot of it herself.

  With a sense of resolve and belated self-appreciation, Sinead made an unusual visit to her distant friend in the student careers office.

  “Look I know you are here to advise students, but I need some advice and you are the obvious person to ask.”

  An hour later, easily, positively, and with growing excitement Sinead had found that her reputation as a very competent organiser, administrator and ‘person who gets things done’ was well established. ‘Build on your strengths’ rang in her ears, and had made the choice of a part-time accountancy course an easy one. She couldn’t believe it was so simple to take the first step. When she started the course she was even more pleased to find that she already had a lot of the information and expertise because of actually keeping books and helping her managers and accountants to prepare reports and find solutions to the perennial need to make the numbers add up. Two nights each week and every Saturday morning, Sinead excelled, blossomed, and made the strides in confidence that she had vaguely thought she could.

  Her mother wrote to her to ask her to make contact with the daughter of an old friend who had recently died. Sinead didn’t know her mother’s friend, although the name was familiar from Christmas cards at home as a child. She once would have shied away from making the contact, but perhaps because she now had something she was more proud of, something to say for herself about her career, she made the call and arranged to meet the recently bereaved Lavinia.

  “Oh it’s so funny to meet someone who knows all those people I’ve heard of. I can’t believe that you are one of those names from the Christmas cards years ago. You had a sister….”

  “Hermione,” prompted Lavinia, “and well might you ask what on earth possessed my parents to come up with those names. I sometimes think that the names they gave us made a lot of things in life inevitable – some impossible, some inescapable.”

  “I can imagine,” sympathised Sinead, not sure if she should be politely disagreeing but unable to stop herself.

  They chatted easily and amiably over a Saturday afternoon coffee and sticky bun in Bewley’s. They each recognised in the other a spirit they couldn’t put a name to, but they agreed, found they intuitively understood the other’s feelings and point of view, and to their mutual surprise were glad they had met.

  Chapter 22

  Dublin: August 2006

  William and James at lunch

  William walked almost jauntily down Grafton Street. The lunchtime crowds were bustling as queues formed in Bewleys and in all the competing cafes and snack bars down the famous shopping street. The smirk on his face betrayed his excess of good humour, and his benevolent air drew the hopeful attention of the supposedly homeless magazine-sellers. Avoiding their clutches he swung left into Suffolk Street, and glancing briefly at the musical instruments on display in a shop window, he strode purposefully to O’Neill’s bar on the corner.

  “You’re looking very pleased with yourself,” challenged James as he nodded to the barman and pointed to the Guinness tap.

  “Well yes, I suppose I am,” agreed William, “But not without good reason I’m happy to say.”

  “So what is it this time? A win on the horses? No, too early in the day for that. A coup at the auction? No, too early for that as well. I give up, you’ll have the pleasure of putting me out of my misery.”

  “I’ll let you suffer until that pint arrives, but I’ll give you one clue. You are right about the financial angle – nothing else guaranteed to put a smile on a man’s face.”

  “Oh, I don’t know about that,” laughed James. “I am reliably informed that intimate relationships with persons of the opposite sex have been known to result in the occasional inane grin.”

  “Short-lived gratification of the baser instincts, old boy.” William shook his head. “They are short-lived and are guaranteed to be followed by grief and tears. Weeping, wailing, and a sore willy are all you get from the opposition. Believe me, I’m one of the walking wounded back from the battle-front.”

  “So the good humour is the result of the gratification of your true love, your everlasting relationship with your wallet?”

  “You make me sound like a shallow, soul-less mercenary. I’ll have you know that this tough exterior hides a sensitive and vulnerable spirit.”

  “You must be the first antique dealer in history to have a sensitive and vulnerable soul. Without exception your colleagues are a grasping greedy crowd of money-grabbing charlatans.”

  “Have to keep body and soul together,” said William with undisturbed equanimity, taking the first sip from the creamy pint. “And I do admit that most of my colleagues in the trade had a scruple-ectomy at an early age.”

  “Scruple-ectomy? While you have just had a triple scruple by-pass?”

  “Exactly. Scruples and finer feelings intact, but not always indulged.”

  “That’s handy. Could I have one as well?”

  “I’ll introduce you to ‘old mother necessity’, who dishes them out free of charge. You’ve just had too cushy a life and never needed to engage in the baser forms of trade. Mind you the banks, your old employer included, are becoming just as bad as the loan-sharks. They invent charges for everything; they’ll soon be charging us for the privilege of charging us.”

  “Don’t laugh, it’ll happen. Did you read in the paper that in the UK, BT has introduced a ‘payment processing charge’? Whatever whiz-kid thought of that has probably been promoted already. Can you believe it? Charging you to accept your money?”

  “That is good. It’s so far-fetched you couldn’t really believe they’d have the nerve to do it. But the phone companies are great at that. Did you read about the mobile phone company that rings people when they are out of the country to sell them international packages? The really brilliant wheeze is that all the time the customer is listening to the sales pitch, their phone is clocking up the extortionate roaming charges. One chap twigged this and asked them, “Who is paying for this call?” And the girl actually said, “Well, you are sir.” Fantastic!”

  “OK. You’re well down that pint now. Time to tell me what has you looking so pleased.”

  “OK,” smiled William, “It’s really quite simple. Today is the day that Pat made the final payment to buy out my share of the old flat. Without lifting a finger I have money in the bank, freedom in my bones, and a song in my heart.”

  “As good as that is it?” laughed James.

  “No, better. Really better by far than a poke in the eye with a burnt stick, or whatever you used to say.”

  They ordered another pint each, moved down the steps to the now-uncrowded lunch counter, and continued their good humoured celebration. James laughed
with William but envied him. His own finances were as bad as ever; his sense of failure as cripplingly intense as ever; and the certainty of the descent into despair that almost always followed a lunch-time session loomed greyly in the eyes despite the laughter. His eyes laughed less than his mouth. A skilled observer would have noticed how quickly the laughter muscles round his mouth dropped their smile and resumed their serious aspect. Just as telling was the way in which his eyes resisted the instruction to smile. Cover the lower half of his face and you wouldn’t have known he was smiling or laughing at all. William didn’t notice this. His own good humour carried him blithely through lunch and into the early afternoon.

  Their conversation turned to other friends, and William quizzed James about the others in the reading group that Lavinia still hosted.

  “She really is quite a character,” confessed an admiring James. “I don’t know where she gets the energy to take up new interests and to do so bloody well at them.”

  “Her photography, do you mean?”

  “Yes, that’s the best example. When I first joined that group she hadn’t even started it. Now she’s virtually a professional, and planning to exhibit.”

  “What about the others in that little group? Whatever happened to that very proper South African?”

  “Simon, you mean. He’s apparently doing fantastically well. Lavinia told me she came across him at a formal do in Trinity a few weeks ago. They’re trying to persuade him to stay on there when he finishes his research. Apparently an absolute genius in his way.”

  “But does he still dress in those dreadful M&S basics?” asked William unkindly.

  “And why not?” countered James, conscious of the label in his own jacket and hoping William couldn’t see it.

  “Steve’s quite a character too isn’t he?” William rambled on, oblivious to James’ discomfort. “Apparently some publisher has paid him a retainer for the book he’s writing. Quite unusual for a first book.”