The Sleepwalkers, page 22
And also, how do you feel about “manspreading”? I’ve never really minded it myself. It’s just a way to sit, after all, especially if you have long legs and need to arrange them. Poor Christos looked less like a confident bro trying to take up the maximum space possible and more like a condemned prisoner trying to burrow into himself. After a few moments he took his head out of his hands and looked at me.
“What do you want?” he said.
“I want all my documents,” I said. “And then I just want to leave. I’m not going to make trouble for anyone.”
This wasn’t a hundred percent true, but I felt like it was what Christos needed to hear.
“And I want to know Hamza’s OK.”
Christos scoffed. “What do you care about Hamza?”
“He tried to help me.”
“Yeah? What did he think you’d give him in return?” Christos sighed, and visibly stopped himself continuing. He shook his head. “I take that back.” He picked up the salt cellar from the table and weighed it in his hand as if it contained the truth. “I did love him, you know.”
“Yeah.”
“You have any idea what it means to be like Hamza, in Turkey?”
I shrugged. I’d read something once about people in the West thinking Muslim countries were much more homophobic than they actually are. But I’d never been to Turkey. I had no idea of what it would be like there for anyone. Was it even officially a Muslim country anyway? I didn’t think so. I vaguely imagined that it would probably be fine if you knew what to do, just like most other places.
“Being used by men, being—”
“OK, we’ve all been used by men,” I snapped. I dislike being lectured to about the patriarchy by its constituents, to be honest.
Christos looked at his feet, then back up at me. A pickup truck on the street behind him beeped at a moped that seemed to have stopped for no reason.
“Hamza wanted to be an artist,” said Christos. “His father went crazy when he went to Istanbul and got a place at art school. Hamza worked in a nightclub to pay his fees. There were student nights, gay nights. Turned out the manager was trafficking and employing illegals. At first Hamza thought it was cool to be working with Syrians and Iraqis. They were queer, like him, or girls who’d got in trouble back home. When he realized they weren’t being paid properly, he complained to the owner. The guy turned nasty and beat Hamza up. It’s not difficult.”
That hung in the air for half a minute.
“So then how did Hamza get involved in the trafficking himself?” I asked. “I mean, if he was so against it? That’s what he was doing, right? Bringing kids over from Turkey, for, like, I don’t know—”
“Photo shoots, marketing for a ‘new band.’ Yup.”
“All organized by Isabella.”
“There are worse people beyond her. Hamza’s not scared of her so much, but he is scared of them.”
“But how did he get involved with them?”
“He went back home for a big holiday, a few years back. Maybe Ramadan? It was pretty intense. Hamza came out to his dad, but it didn’t go well. They had a big fight. Hamza stuck around, hoping they’d find some peace, only then his dad got Covid, no doubt from his son arriving from the big city. It was in the early days, and there were no antivirals or vaccines.” Christos paused. “His dad died.”
“Fucking hell.”
“Right? So Hamza goes back to Istanbul, kinda broken, only now he has to make money to send his mom to pay for the house, and all the bills, and all his little sisters’ shit, as they have zero income now his dad’s dead. The dude who ran the nightclub gave Hamza a lot of extra shifts, but it wasn’t enough, so he asked how he could make more money. All he had to do at first was befriend students or under-age kids who came to the club. They had to be vulnerable somehow, needy. He’d invite them for band auditions, or to do ‘modeling.’ There was a lot of bullshit, obviously, but eventually they’d end up on a private yacht to the island—all very impressive. They’d stay at Isabella’s and get their pictures taken, and then on the last day their passports would disappear and they’d be sold on, to work in villas or on yachts or, if it was a pretty girl, to work as a personal maid in London or New York or Dubai.”
“A ‘personal maid’?”
“Yeah, I don’t know if they were prostitutes exactly. They probably ended up in a better country than the one they’d come from anyway.”
“I thought Turkey was quite a good place to live?”
“There are desperate kids everywhere. Kids get trafficked out of London and New York as well.”
“And the refugee camps here of course.”
“Yeah.” Christos looked down at the floor. “That’s on me. If he hadn’t met me, he wouldn’t have wanted to stay on the island. He—”
“Where’s Hamza now?”
Christos shrugged. “I honestly don’t know. Probably packing, now he’s got your attention. He’ll think you’ll repay him by taking him back to the UK and sponsoring his visa. Or you’ll help him claim asylum.”
“Can Turkish people even get asylum in the UK? I mean, Turkey’s in NATO. It’s virtually the EU.”
“He wants to report Isabella and the traffickers, but then he can never come back.”
“Which would devastate you, right? Maybe even get you arrested.”
“It’s more complicated than that.”
“Come on. You obviously still love him. Please say you haven’t hurt him.”
Christos said nothing. The street behind him was suddenly still and silent.
I stood up and took a couple of steps away from Christos.
“Because you killed the sleepwalkers in a jealous rage, right?”
Christos shook his head and rolled his eyes.
“Yeah, that’s exactly how you kill people when you’re in a jealous rage.”
“So you admit you gave them the sleeping pills.”
“Hardly.”
“Come on, you as good as say it on the transcript. I think the software wrote ‘slipping peels’ but I knew what it meant.”
“I don’t think that’s gonna stand up anywhere.”
“What did Isabella do? Did she show you the letter Hamza wrote to James Border, the super-religious guy? All about giving Hamza love? I’m guessing James meant spiritual love, but you misunderstood, didn’t you? You thought Hamza was going to meet him for sex.”
Christos sighed. “It didn’t matter if it was love or sex. The result would have been the same.”
“You would have lost him.”
“He thought if he could get to the US or the UK he’d finally be able to make enough money for his mother, but in a legitimate way, not by hurting people.”
“And you wanted to stop him?”
“That makes it sound wrong. I wanted to support him, but—”
“Isabella told you Hamza and James were hooking up? And she showed you the note Hamza wrote, to prove it.”
“Why does it matter?”
“You took away Hamza’s one chance of freedom!”
“Did I? He didn’t even want to go to the UK anyway. He was much more desperate to go to the US, the land of Lou Reed and Andy Warhol. We were going to get married, but—”
“Where is he, Christos?”
“He’s exactly where he wants to be.”
“Oh, for God’s sake.”
“Have you even stopped for one second to examine your own assumptions? You assume that all gay people are psychos who commit murder every time they feel jealous?”
I sighed. “Don’t do that.” I paused. “You tried to kill my fucking husband.”
“No. I did not try to kill your fucking husband.”
I grimaced. “Right.”
“You wanna know why? Because I am nowhere near the biggest psycho on this island,” he said. “You got the wrong guy.”
“You tried to drive me into a fucking tree!”
“Yeah, but I didn’t do it, did I? I’ve got issues, but I’m not a goddamn murderer.”
“Who, then? Kostas?”
Christos laughed bitterly. “Poor stupid Kostas. She owns him too.”
“So you’re saying Isabella did everything?”
At that point, I felt we were going around in circles.
“Ask yourself who owns Isabella,” he said, standing up. “And then you’ll find Hamza. And the rest of your stupid documents.”
“What happened to my husband?” I asked.
“I don’t know.”
“How can you not know?”
“I wasn’t there. I told her not to do it. Just before we brought you out. She’d never gone that far before. You know, she’s never actually killed anyone herself. Not even her husband. Far as the police are concerned, she’s as innocent as a fucking baby.”
“Then what happened to Richard? And how did the sleepwalkers die?”
“The sleepwalkers drowned, just like the autopsy said.”
“Oh come on,” I said. “We both know they were murdered.”
“Isabella knows some pretty bad people,” said Christos, as if that explained it. He paused. “I knew you were faking, by the way. And I ignored your passport—did you not wonder about that? I told her to wait, to find some other way. I was trying to save you, and your ridiculous husband. I guess you didn’t realize that I was running after Kostas while he chased you.”
“I—”
“You didn’t think it was weird when he just stopped running after you?”
“I assumed I’d outrun him,” I said.
“I brought him down,” said Christos. “I fucking saved you.”
“But why? I mean, before that, when I heard a buzz, I thought it was you electrocuting Richard.”
“No. She was just testing it.”
“So then where is he?” I asked. “Where’s my husband?”
Christos shook his head. “I don’t know.”
As I walked down the street after leaving the taverna, I thought back to a particularly rainy day in Russell, just a couple of weeks before. It hadn’t yet turned into a full-blown cyclone and they were still calling it a “tropical low.” The sun had unexpectedly come out, late in the day, and I’d attempted to clean the wooden deck of my flat above the pizza restaurant. I’d seen a native pigeon that day, a kererū, its fat white legs like something you’d usually see covered in gravy, pecking away at a soaked cabbage palm for its unripe berries, its bright orange eyes flashing in the brief sunlight. I’d begun to clean the deck’s major eyesore: a rotten old bird table that had been hanging from the branches of another tree for several winters and summers, and which now housed several different spiders. I was trying to clean it without killing the spiders when a tiny moth landed on its small roof. One of the spiders saw it and it darted out, ready to pounce. My instinct told me to give the moth a little push to make it fly away, thus saving its life. I did it—anyone would have done the same—but as the spider scuttled back to its web, disappointed, I realized that saving the moth meant killing the spider, or at least starving it to death. And maybe I hadn’t even saved the moth, because you’re not really supposed to touch their wings, however gently.
I arrived at the curio shop before I’d even thought about what I was going to do or say. I’d believed I was calm, but when I got there I realized I was so pumped with adrenaline I was ready to bust my way in and rip the shop apart. Looking back now, I guess I was a little unhinged—not the way you thought, though. I wanted to find out what had happened to Richard, and I wanted my documents, and I wanted to help Hamza. His story had touched me deeply. Maybe the reasons for that are obvious; maybe not. I wanted so many things at once it was all a tangle. I felt stronger than I really am, fiercer.
But the door to the curio shop was locked and bolted, which was odd, because it was a weekday, and some time before lunch. I peered in through the window. At first, all I could see were the silent shadows of bookshelves and riding crops, and the ghostly outlines of all the long white dresses that you could sleep in if you were rich or get married in if you were poor.
Then I saw the wooden chair in the center of the back room.
Hamza was sitting on it, naked from the waist up. Where was his usual scarf? His shoulders were thrust forward at a slightly unnatural angle and I could see the sharp jut of his collarbones. I realized with a gasp that his hands were behind the chair: indeed, that’s where his scarf was, tied in a brutal-looking knot around his tiny wrists while the ends trailed on the floor like a spilled drink. Across the room was the dapper little man, sketching the scene with a stick of charcoal.
It all made sense once I’d put it together. The dapper little man was the reason for everything. It was he, after all, who had been negotiating with Marcus and Debbie to sell the story of the sleepwalkers. It was he who had stolen all the documents and put them together in the first place. He had been Speaker 4 on the transcript. He was the one I’d originally thought was getting a fetishistic kind of pleasure from controlling everything around him, the one Christos had described on the transcript as a “little vampire.”
I was just about to try and kick the door in when I saw Hamza smile, and then laugh. He said something to the dapper little man, who smiled back and nodded. I suddenly couldn’t understand the scene at all. Its meaning fluttered away from me like an uncaged bird. Then Hamza spotted me looking in the window. The dapper little man had his head bent over his sketch, and Hamza frowned at me and shook his head. His shoulders lifted into a nonchalant shrug. He seemed to be saying, I’m fine. Go away. I wasn’t sure, so I kept staring for a few moments, but all I saw was more easy laughter and banter between them. The scene seemed to be telling me to leave. So I did, feeling utterly confused.
When I got back to the hotel, as I said, the bundle of documents was gone.
But don’t worry, Annabelle, I took pictures of everything. I’d photographed each sheet of paper as I’d read it earlier that day, just as any sensible person would have done. So, yes, I no longer had the originals, but I had the material itself. I had what I’d come for, more or less. I was still missing a few pages, but I’d already read the guest book entry, and I suppose I thought I knew by then what Richard’s confession was. As I reflected on this, I felt the spark of something creative, the same as the feeling I’d had back in Athens after the wedding, when I was so traumatized I’d decided my life from then on would be fictional, like a play I was only acting in. The documents did make a good story, although not in the exact order the dapper little man had arranged them. I wondered about a different way of telling things. A new focus. Certainly an alternative to Isabella’s murder mystery with me as the killer. Then I called Debbie’s number.
She didn’t pick up, which was disappointing. Ideas were racing through my mind like spirited reindeer and I wanted to make them real by telling them to someone. Perhaps that’s also when I thought I should write to you, but of course I didn’t begin this letter until much later, when I was back in New Zealand.
It was a couple of hours after dinner when the package was slipped under my hotel room door.
It was an A4 brown envelope, unsealed, like a thirsty mouth.
Did it contain my missing pages? I opened the flap and pulled out what appeared to be a short series of charcoal sketches, on thick creamy paper. On the first page, I was puzzled to see the girl with the “Istanbul is Contemporary” bag. She had been drawn inside a framed panel like in a comic book, with tables from a café scattered along the edge of the sea behind her.
The next sketch zoomed out to show a woman—did she look unnervingly like me?—reading the comic book with this panel in it. The woman’s face was mine, I realized, and her hands somehow were too: the nails cut square, with the same chipped nail polish I was wearing right now. The woman had her fingers poised to turn the page, to see what happens next. There was another sheet under the first two, and so I had to turn the page just as cartoon-me did. Nice touch, I half-thought.
When I saw what was on the next sheet, I retched, and dropped everything. But then I forced myself to pick it up and look at it. Brace yourself, Annabelle. The focus of the scene had been expanded again so that the entire woman was now shown, reading her comic book. The face and hands remained realistic, but the body was both too skinny and too voluptuous. The woman’s breasts pushed against a tight white shirt and almost touched the desk she’d bent over to read the comic book, which she held in both hands, her elbows resting schoolgirlishly beside her breasts, which were not as a schoolgirl’s breasts should be. The woman’s tiny skirt had been roughly pulled up over her shapely arse, all the way to her waist. You could tell the skirt had been roughly pulled up because the man’s hands were still gripping it with some force as he penetrated her with his large penis. His expression was one of violence and pain, but on the woman’s face was a simple, innocent smile.
The man looked exactly like Peter.
When I retrieved the envelope from the floor where I’d dropped it, my hand trembling, I saw there was a plane ticket back to Athens for the next morning. I’d been planning to take the ferry again in a few days’ time, but suddenly I wanted to leave as soon as possible. I had to get away from that terrible place, with its cruelty and drama. Much as I hated doing it, I heeded the warning. I packed quickly and left the next day.
When I paid my bill at reception there was another envelope for me, of the same sort as the one that had been pushed under my door. This time it was sealed. I didn’t want to open it, of course.
When I did, it contained the remains of the guest-book pages, and the second part of Richard’s letter, both crudely photocopied.
I’d much rather have read the rest of Richard’s letter in private than on the tiny plane with the whirring propellers and happy tourists. I must have looked a mess, sobbing without a tissue.
Paul, I kept thinking. Paul.
Even now, his name still turns me inside out.
I hung around Athens for the two remaining days until my flight back to London. It was hot and dusty, with long traffic jams down roads lined with parked mopeds and orange trees. Street cats sunbathed on ancient ruins. I walked up to the Acropolis—or at least, until the point where you have to pay. There were street-hawkers, scammers and beggars. How many of them were doing it through choice, I wondered. There were men who would get chatting to tourists, asking where they were from and if they liked music. They’d then give a friendship bracelet as a “gift.” Presumably they would demand money once the offering was accepted. Gifts so often come with an edge or a threat, don’t you think, Annabelle?
