Balzac of the Badlands

by Steve Finbow

  ‘Anyone else in here?’

  ‘Yeah. Usual lot.’

  ‘So, nothing unusual?’

  ‘No, as I said.’

  ‘Cheers,’ I say.

  Nothing much doing here. Bit of a wasted journey. I thank the waiter again, walk back out on to the street a bit lost as to what to do next. I nip into a newsagents, buy a Topic and eat half of it as I’m leaving the store. As I bite into what seems to be the only hazelnut in the whole bar, I look down. Looking up at me are two of the dopiest eyes you’ve ever seen – big, black, wet, and blinking – until they see me, that is, then there’s just panic. I’ll spare you the bodily function details; suffice to say it isn’t a pretty sight. The poor thing rescued in a state of shock by its owner – a Greek man who runs the dry-cleaners’ just two shops along. He comes out, scoops the puppy up in his arms, looks around to see what or who has caused the trauma, and goes back into his store. I, of course, look the other way. Oblivious.

  The puppy’s life, as much as I see of it, comprises sitting on a chair in the window of the shop, inhaling cleaning-product fumes, slurping up jellybeans – he prefers the blackcurrant ones and is not too fond of the green – and nipping outside for a piss. Big help that is.

  ‘Dog all right?’ I say, walking into the dry-cleaners’.

  ‘Yeah, he’s fine. Something scared him.’

  The dog is on its chair, a quivering mass of fur jelly, its eyes watering, tendrils of drool swinging from its chops.

  ‘Seen her before?’ I say flipping over the photo.

  ‘Yeah, she comes in now and again. Brings work suits. Not seen her for a while.’

  ‘When was the last time?’

  ‘Few days ago. Tuesday. Yeah, I was looking down the street – Apollo had wandered off – I saw her get in a car. Thought it a bit strange, it being lunchtime, and her only working around the corner, like.’

  ‘Who did she get in the car with? An older geezer?’

  ‘Nah. Three blokes. Looked like Kurds.’

  ‘No way,’ I say, then bite my lip at my Mikey-like pun.

  ‘Way,’ the guy says and laughs.

  ‘What did they look like?’

  ‘I dunno. Kurds,’ he says helpfully.

  ‘What about the motor?’

  ‘Nice. Saab. Black.’

  ‘She get in the front or back?’

  ‘Back with two of them. Just the driver in the front.’

  ‘Bit weird.’

  ‘Could’ve been a taxi.’

  ‘A Saab taxi? Around here?’

  ‘Yeah. They did a u-ey and shot off towards Wood Green.’

  ‘Cheers,’ I say. ‘Dog want this?’ I hold up the half-eaten Topic.

  ‘Go on, then,’ he says.

  I walk out, making sure I don’t make further eye contact with the dog, and as I do, I see the man lift the Topic to his lips, take a bite. He’d better not find a hazelnut.

  Afternoons in North London: sky the colour of corrupted pearl. The sun, a rumour of Spanish gold at the bottom of the ocean. What was Sarah Beckford doing getting into a Saab with three Kurds? She didn’t say anything to her father about it. It couldn’t have been work. None of her friends mentioned Kurdish boyfriends. Looks like it’s back to Green Lanes. I take out my mobile.

  ‘Yeah, all right, Ozan? Busy?’

  ‘–––-’

  ‘Got something I wanna ask you.’

  ‘–––-’

  ‘Palmers Green. Be with you in 30 minutes.’

  ‘–––-’

  ‘Where?’ I look around and behind me is a greengrocers’, there’s a geezer standing out front holding a watermelon under his arm, mobile in his other hand up to his ear, looking my way.

  ‘–––-’

  ‘Zaza? You’re having a laugh.’ The watermelon guy holds his hand up.

  ‘–––-’

  ‘Cool. See you soon. Cheers.’

  Another guy holding two watermelons comes out of the shop and walks towards me gesturing at the road. As I turn, I hear the release thunk of car doors, and see an Audi wink and blink. The guy points at the passenger seat. I get in. He gets in, lobs the watermelons on the back

  seat, starts the car and we’re off. Not a word. We pull up outside the Qedrî Can social club. I get out, nod thanks.

  Through the multi-coloured beaded curtains, and the air smells of burnt coffee. At the centre of the room, a pool table, the last game abandoned midway by the looks of it. Sitting at tables, old men play backgammon or cards. I smell food cooking; the aromas make my stomach growl and groan. I walk up to the counter where a young bearded man sits reading a book.

  ‘Ozan about?’

  ‘Who wants?’

  ‘We all do, mate. It’s the ones that get who are happy.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Ozan about?’

  I hear the laugh – like two crows fighting over a trombone – before I see the man. He comes out and before I have time to move he grasps me in a bear hug.

  ‘Balzac, you bastard. What can I do for you, son?’

  Ozan Kemal – Kurdish, ex-freedom fighter, ex-most wanted man in some town in Turkey, ex-gun runner. Now a pillar of Haringey’s Kurdish community. Nothing goes down in little Kurdistan that Ozan doesn’t know about. Or so he’d like to think.

  ‘What’s with the watermelons?’

  ‘Is that it? Is that all you want to know?’

  ‘No. Just curious.’

  ‘Can’t say.’

  ‘OK. Know anything about three of your kinsmen maybe kidnapping a 26-year-old woman from the mean streets of Palmers Green in broad daylight on Tuesday?’

  Ozan lifts his chin, swivels it around a bit, raises his bottom lip over his top one, sniffs, does an eye roll, a forehead shrug, and says,

  ‘What?’

  ‘You heard. I’m on a case. Greek dry-cleaner tells me he saw three Kurdish-looking geezers with the woman I’m looking for. She hasn’t been seen since that afternoon.’

  ‘None of my lot,’ Ozan says, ‘but I’ll look into it for you. Some new guys in the area, maybe.’

  ‘They ain’t new,’ I say, ‘they were driving a Saab.’

  ‘A Saab? Nice. Look, got a lot on my plate right now. Something going on. Trying to deal with some grief from the Somalis.’

  ‘Yeah, I heard. Dumar told me.’

  ‘Dumar? Where did you run into him?’

  ‘You wouldn’t believe me. On a bus.’

  ‘You’re pulling my plonker,’ Ozan says.

  Accent straight out of Hackney. Reckons he picked it up off the mercenaries he knew working the mountains on the Turkey/Iraq border.

  ‘Nah, straight. He also said something about Kurds and smack.’

  ‘Nothing to do with me.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Yep. You know me, Balzac.’

  ‘Shit! Idiot,’ I say, theatrically banging my forehead with the palm of my right hand.

  ‘What?’

  ‘S’all right. Just had one of my Sherlock moments. Bloody sugar low’s scrambled my brain cells. Look, have a word when you’ve got your shit sorted, ask about the boys in the Saab. Here,’ and I hand him a picture of Sarah Beckford.

  ‘Not bad,’ he says.

  ‘Not good, either,’ I say, reaching for my moby. ‘Where are you?’

  ‘–––-’

  ‘Well, go to Beckford’s Haulage.’

  ‘–––-’

  ‘I don’t care how you get there. Where’s your motor?’

  ‘–––-’

  ‘How many?’

  ‘–––-’

  ‘Just do it.’

  ‘H?’ Ozan says.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘I’ll give you a bell if I hear anything. ‘

  ‘Cool.’ And I’m out of there.

  ***

  Tower blocks, vertical villages I heard Balzac once describe them. Stuff and nonsense. Vertical slums more like, befitting the bubals of Bombay or Lagos’s unsightly outgrowths
. Grey and no doubt still stained sheets hang over the balconies making these not-so social edifices resemble giant ships, galleons of the murky London afternoon; that, or strange creatures, mutated out of the Burgess-shale, armoured with satellite dishes and thrusting aerials. If I may direct your attention to the middle block of the three just before us. It has a red roof, for some reason, distinguishing it from its partners of blue and yellow. If you cast your eyes up to the ninth floor, and go way over to your right. There. See the burned area on the wall? The blackened windows? The scorch marks, like smudged eyeliner? A few months back, some deranged fellow, a moron named Henry something or other, spent the afternoon using his dog as a furred censer, swinging it back and forth from its lead of leather and chain. Cruel, one might say. Indeed. Crueller, in that the poor pooch not only dangled from its leather and chain lead but also from the metal, concrete, and glass balcony. Back and forth it went like a large hirsute and panting pendulum. Very cruel. And I am not quite finished. The retard Henry had also – with the aid no doubt of lighter fuel or alcohol – set the dog – Huggsy, I think was its name, what a ridiculous appellation for a canine – and at last we get there – on fire. It resembled nothing less than something out of the siege of Megiddo. Rather than letting the flaming and yelping dogtorch drop to the ground, imbecilic Henry hauled the smoking mutt back up on to the balcony, setting the unwatered pot plants and his flat aflame. The dog died. Henry became a patient in a nearby underfunded hospital with third-degree burns covering 90% of his body. Let’s hope that the more serious ones were to his head, transforming what little brain he had into a foaming encephalonic broth. Twat. Hello, my name’s Homo Sapiens Sapiens Jones. I’m sure Balzac’s mentioned me. I’m off to Beckford Haulage and on my way I’ll introduce myself in more detail.

  It’s 1961 and, among other things – one can forget JFK, the Russian fellow in space, Papa Hemingway making ketchup of his head in Ketchum, and the start of the Vietnam War – I am born. I spring fully-formed if miniaturized and uncoordinated from my mother’s marooned womb, push open the cinema-like curtains of her labia, and exit on to cyanic rubber sheets, fumbled by clumsy and bloodied hands with a shriek and shrug and a ‘So, that’s what it looks like out here.’ The midwife gets a wink, the doctor a poke in the eye, my mother, unconscious and already dreaming of Riesling, farts loudly in syncopation with my dispatch, and the first aroma of life I inhale swaddles me in its Yorkshire-pudding-and-treacle-tart embrace. An hour after my slippery exudation, Father’s telegram informs Mother not of his joy at being the illustrious male parent of a frantically kicking and goggle-eyed quadruped, but rather that he is departing on the 1500 hours ferry from somewhere in the godforsaken North of England and will be disembarking at another equally depressing town on the continent of Europe. Purple and naked as I am, from the moment the telegram becomes precipitant confetti, I intuit that Mother’s unconcern at being left a single parent plays into my grasping sticky little hands. I lie beside Mother while she swigs from a smuggled bottle of German wine, steadily infusing her milk with a pineapple and honey thrill. My birth day. My father is not the only one to leave the confines and comforts of the familiar, for there in my pale blue wraps I am alert and preternaturally grandiloquent – as you no doubt surmise – and not mute and wallowing in my sac – fie on those bursting forewaters of the amnion! And fie once more, for I have reached my destination and will have to interrupt my memoir to elicit information as to the whereabouts of a certain Mr. Beckford. I must call the Mermaid and inform her of my whereabouts and of Balzac’s attempts to hijack the narrative for his own selfish purposes. Next: the early years.

  ***

  ‘Oh, he has, has he? Well, we’ll just see about that, won’t we? Thank you, H. A gentleman as always.’

  The little sod. Hi, my name’s Meredith Le Fanu, uncommonly known as The Mermaid, Balzac’s one-time sometime paramour. My god, I sound like H. I mean girlfriend, lover, partner, better – you choose. Actually, no. I will. Better. Paramour is a poor choice of words, one that H would never make. But I suppose my relationship with Balzac is somewhat adulterous. I see you’re shocked. Balzac is married. Of sorts. Hitched to his job, wed to his ego, groom to the bride that is his charm. H tells me Balzac has been leading you astray. I’ve been mentioned in passing, apparently. I’m the little woman at home, the nag on the phone, the girl stood up in the restaurant. I bet you thought, ‘Ah, I see what’s happening here, it’s the old unseen-woman trick – ‘her indoors’, ‘Norm’s wife’, ‘Maris’. Hah! Not bloody likely. If you have a minute, I’ll let you into a few secrets. Mine.

  I first met Balzac in Morocco. At the time, I was an impressionable young girl of seventeen. Tangier. I am there on holiday with Spaghetti Monster and The Bush and we are all having a wonderful time. Those two go to the beach every day, fighting off flies and men, attempting to get a tan, while I sit on the balcony, or at a terrace bar along the front, catching up with Sufi literature. I have red hair and the sun brings out my freckles. After an hour or so of sunbathing, it looks like someone has stood over me and dripped oxtail soup across my nose and cheeks. I burn very easily and dislike having sand between my toes, so I try to minimise my time under the solar system’s pulsing heart and heat. Oh, the nickname – The Mermaid – we’ll come to that. So, I’m sitting at a table overlooking the beach, watching Spaghetti Monster and The Bush indulge in their own personal tug-of-war with their bikini, when I hear the chink and rattle of a glass on my table. I put down my book, look up, shade my eyes with my hand, and peer over the top of my sunglasses.

  ‘Thought you looked thirsty,’ the young man says, ‘so I bought you one of these lemon Fantas. Limon, or whatever. What you reading?’

  I flip up the book cover and he bends forward to read the title.

  ‘Conference of the Birds. Sounds like a nightmare. What’s it about? Women gossiping?’

  ‘It’s a Sufi poem.’

  ‘Sufi? What’s that? Red Indians?’

  ‘No. Do you mind?’

  ‘No, not if you don’t,’ he says, sitting down.

  ‘I’m trying to read. My friends will be back any minute,’ I say motioning towards the beach.

  ‘They’re mad sunbathing on that. It’s covered with shit. And not just from dogs.’

  ‘Well, they don’t have much choice, do they?’

  ‘Wait a minute. Where are they?’

  ‘There,’ I say, pointing to Spaghetti Monster and The Bush now wrestling with a towel.

  ‘Where’s the other one?’

  ‘What other one?’

  ‘You said ‘friends’ as in more than one, plural, friend-zzzzz.’

  ‘There,’ I say, pointing again.

  ‘Yeah, right,’ he says. ‘Anyway, where you staying?’

  ‘In the Medina.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Yeah, a friend of my father has contacts here.’

  ‘Dinner?’

  ‘No, thanks.’

  ‘OK. See ya.’

  And he leaves. And I am intrigued.

  I take out my notebook and write down the encounter so that I can later add it to my journal.

  I’m a religious maniac. Don’t let it put you off. I don’t mean I suffer from Jerusalem Syndrome, want to run off and join the Taliban, or sleep with the Archbishop of Canterbury, I mean I love learning about the world’s religions. My favourites are Sufism, Buddhism, Shinto, and Candomblé. When I was a little girl, I ran away from home on a number of occasions. My parents found me in different churches in North London. Once, I got as far as Christchurch, Southgate. ‘The thing’ happened the first time I went into a church on my own. I might as well tell you now, otherwise if it occurs later during the case/story, you’ll pull a face and think, ‘Ah, deus ex machina’. And we wouldn’t want that now, would we?

  OK. I’m five years old, I’m looking in my father’s art books at madonnas, Christ crucified, the pietas; my head is swimming with blond curls, chubby cherubs, and Mary mother of god who always seems
to be sucking on a lemon. Out of my ever-forming memory springs visions of bigger versions of these in that cold and smelly building my parents took me to a few weeks back. Some kind of boring ceremony. We walked there, so it can’t be far. Mother is in the garden diddling with her roses and father is upstairs building a papier-mâché train tunnel. I put on my Paddington Bear duffel coat, my zippered wellies, and reach up to turn the catch on the front door. Magically, it opens.

  The world rushes in. The privet hedge alive with sparrows, the path glistening with amber, beryl, and jet; the garden gate like a miniature portcullis. The lawn’s smooth, green, rectangular calm, before the blurred and brazen motor cars smear colours before my wide eyes. The gate latch is cold, hook-shaped like a hawk’s bill, and I ease it up as if the metal is about to call ‘Mother! Mother!’ The gate swings open on its spring. I step on to the pavement in front of my house, it feels as if it is moving, like a conveyor belt, like the world is a spinning top, a busy apple. I feel hot in my coat but know I will be safe in it, tucked up, coddled. The building I am looking for is big, bigger than our house, but not as big as the supermarket. And it is old, older than our house, much older than the supermarket. And it is a funny shape. Our house is a square and a rectangle with the sides pushed in on top. The supermarket is a big big square. The building I am looking for is long and thin and pointy. My house is reddy brown, the supermarket is orange and white, and the building I am looking for is grey but yellowy. People stare at me as I walk. I don’t smile. I am concentrating. There it is. Taller than I remember but that’s because Father was carrying me on his shoulders.

  I enter and walk along the middle aisle. The light shining through the windows paints rippling pools of colour on the floor. The air is full of dust specks I believe to be angels. To the right of the cross at the end of the aisle, a painting like those in my father’s art books. I stand beneath it, look up at a man’s bearded face – the man’s eyes blink, his mouth opens, and he says,

  ‘You’re the first visitor we’ve had today and we’ve been open since eight this morning. Don’t know what the world’s coming to. There was a time when we’d pack them in. People sitting on the floor at the front of the church, standing in the doorway. Not now. They rush in, rush out, bobbing up and down like they’re dodging gunfire. Funny, as well, most of the people back then when we were busy wore hats.’