Chapter 7

Vida couldn’t wait to get home. The first thing she did after checking in
her luggage at Istanbul Atatürk Airport and locating the loos was to send
her housesitter a message: On my way!
The next question was what she should have to drink. There’d be free
wine on the plane. A beer might be a nice way to start the journey home,
but she didn’t want to have to be getting up to pee all the time, even
though she’d booked an aisle seat with precisely this concern in mind.
Gin and tonic, then, she decided, after considering the full algorithm of
alcoholic beverage choice. She was even wearing a little badge Rozzie
had made her: The problem with the world is that everybody is a few drinks
behind.
She could almost taste the tonic bubbles on her tongue as she made her
way across the concourse towards the nearest bar. Maybe that was what
young people meant these days by this odd concept, ‘pre-drinks’. In her
eagerness to reach the bar, she was preparing to overtake an Asian-look-
ing man wheeling his hand luggage ahead of her when, WTF, he fainted
on the tiles.
Vida looked around to see if assistance was forthcoming, but the Turk-
ish officials merely glanced in her direction and then actively kept their
distance.
Vida knelt beside the fallen man to see if she could help. She was
joined by a concerned fellow traveller, a woman with an English accent.
‘Call for help!’ Vida shouted over her shoulder to the officials, who
were still pretending that nothing had happened. ‘This is an emergency!’
Another female traveller, a woman dressed in a burka, hovered, obvi-
ously wanting to assist, but reluctant to be seen approaching a strange
male. She signalled to Vida and, when she had her attention, handed her
a bottle of water.
‘Thanks,’ said Vida, and sprinkled it over the man.
‘Okay, okay, okay,’ she said to let him know that someone, at least,
was there.

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 This guy lying on the tiles was hearing nothing, and that was not good.
Vida wanted all the sounds of Istanbul Atatürk Airport – its echoes, its
voices speaking in low frequencies and in many languages, its high-fre-
quency announcements, the drag of luggage wheels, the high-pitched
warning of a shuttle cart in reverse – to break into his consciousness,
wake him bloody well up.
‘Okay, okay, okay,’ she said again.
‘Think I can see some help on its way,’ said the Englishwoman. ‘Taking
their sweet time about it.’
The prostrate man came to, sweaty and pallid. Vida and the English-
woman continued to speak to him in calm voices. Help was on its way,
they told him.
He was apologetic. ‘I think it was the sushi.’
‘You ate sushi in an airport?’ asked Vida. She looked at the English-
woman, whose disbelief mirrored hers.
The man nodded.
He ate sushi in an AIRPORT. How fucking stupid was that? Poor
crippled-chromosome male, thought Vida, though to be fair this one
seemed quite nice. Most of them couldn’t think their way out of a take-
away carton, though.
At last the airport medicos presented themselves. They transferred the
man to a stretcher.
‘Thank you, thank you. Goodbye,’ the invalid said to Vida as he was
wheeled away.
Vida searched her mind for some Japanese word of well-wishing.
She’d never taken a show to Tokyo, yet she felt she’d been there in some
other life. Yay! It came to her: that hunk Richard Chamberlain in Shōgun.
‘Sayounara,’ she said and hoisted her carry-on luggage onto her shoul-
der again.
The Englishwoman turned to Vida and said, ‘Goodbye, sister.’
‘Goodbye, sister,’ Vida replied.
No time left for a drink, though she needed one more than ever.
Vida used her last minutes before the boarding call to buy a box of
Turkish delight. She liked buying stuff to give to other people. At the
spice market and the Grand Bazaar, she and Rozzie had been easily lured

39
by vendors crying out: ‘Come inside and let me rip you off,’ and ‘Do you
want to buy something you don’t need?’ LOL.
Rozzie had done the bargaining so that Vida could carry away a silk
pocket scarf. Before leaving the hotel, she’d popped it inside the show’s
branded mug. These presents, tucked away in the luggage she’d checked
in already, were to express her thanks to her housesitter for looking after
Trinculo and the kitties.
She missed the animals so much. Leaving them always felt like a be-
trayal. From the moment she took her suitcase down from the top of
the wardrobe, Trinks kept a sad-eyed vigil. Calico climbed in among the
clothes she was packing and Torbie stared, her chin drawn deep into the
great boa of her fur, cat-full of disapproval. (The many well-fed strays of
Istanbul had been even better fed and petted during Vida’s stay.)
Vida also missed her own bed, her sea view, her fridge, normal-sized
bars of soap and, yes, her wastepaper basket. WTF did hoteliers think
they were doing? The number of times she’d had to hang a plastic bag
from the door handle for lack of this basic item!
Home wasn’t perfect. According to her housesitter, there was a war-
rant out for her arrest in South Africa because of some fucking unpaid
speeding fine. She could sort that out with her saved per diems. But the
moment she touched down, the familiar worry would return: what would
her next gig be and when? Surely she’d get the Korea–Hong Kong tour
though?
‘Oh your job is so glamorous!’ people said. ‘All that free travel!’ The truth
was that touring was overrated. Until you’re actually IN one, a ‘Turkish
bath’ sounds lovely. But what woman really wants to have her naked body
scrubbed like a dog and then rinsed off under a tap by another naked
woman wielding a loofah, WTF?
And with a six-day working week, there was so little time for sightsee-
ing. The visit to the old city had to be squeezed into one of their Mondays
off. On her last Monday she was tempted to crawl into her hotel bed and
stay there all day. She might have done so if Mehmet hadn’t suggested
that interested crew members meet him in a place called Bebek, on the
edge of the Bosphorus. They’d spent a pleasant afternoon walking, eating,
beer-tasting and getting a bit of Turkish history instruction inside the

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ancient fortress with its cannons and clusters of little restaurants. She’d
already forgotten most of the history part, LOL, but she remembered
the stuffed aubergines, and Mehmet laughing so much that his shoulders
shook and his head nearly landed on the table. Sometimes, just when you
were fed up with the foreignness of foreigners, you met a Mehmet.
He just slightly lacked the kind of sex appeal that might have led to
some rumpy-pumpy, which often lightened the tedium of these tours.
She was at the boarding gate, surrounded by South African accents
again.

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