Time to Die

2

He had just finished unloading the contents of the shopping trolley on to the conveyor belt at the checkout when Reyhan, his four-year-old daughter, looked up at him suddenly and said, ‘Papa, I need to go to the toilet.’

Mehmet sighed out loud and scratched his beard in irritation. He looked down in exasperation at the little girl. She tugged at one of her pigtails and the morning sun, flooding through the huge, long, low front window of the supermarket, shone brightly on the small, gold earrings she wore. Three times earlier in maybe the past hour, he had checked, at the restaurant where he worked, at the library where they had gone to change books and get a DVD, and, as they’d walked in to the supermarket at the entrance, now thirty checkouts away, ‘Do you want the toilet?’ The answer to which, each time, had been a definitive, ‘No, Papa.’

‘I need to go to the toilet.’ It was a form of shorthand. Mehmet knew from past experience that what it really meant was, ‘I’m going to the toilet any second now.’ He looked around him for inspiration.

The supermarket in Wood Green in North London offered him little obvious help. It was huge. Mehmet was from Nevs¸ehir in the centre of Turkey, which is a fairly large city, but it had nowhere that was anything like the size of this monolithic shop. Mehmet had been initially daunted by the supermarket’s vastness, but not any more. He’d become a regular. Familiarity had tamed the enormous retail space. He came here, without fail, with his two children every Thursday at 11.30 a.m. Nur, Mehmet’s wife, found the place intimidating. Nevs¸ehir is not a multicultural city, and the black and Asian faces surrounding her when she went shopping were unfamiliar, frightening and unsettling, even though she’d been in London for over a year. So it was that the weekly bulk shop passed to Mehmet.

Mehmet, like more or less everyone in the supermarket, staff and customers alike, had a strict routine. He himself used the place largely for non-food items. He was here mainly for Baby Ali, his eighteen-month-old son, to buy Pampers, wet wipes, nappy sacks, the kind of things that toddlers need. He hardly ever bought food there. Vegetables, Nur bought at the local market where many of the stallholders were Turkish and she felt more at home, for her English was practically non-existent, and meat came from the Halal butchers near their small flat. Again, she could speak Turkish to them. The stallholders were mainly Northern Cypriots, who make up most of the four hundred thousand Turks in London, and their Turkish sounded strange to her ears, but it was Turkish nevertheless.

Ali was sitting in the baby seat at the front of the trolley, his legs in their romper suit poking out in front of him, little blue boots laced on his feet. His small face was solemn. He was a very self-possessed child, one hand holding on to the front of the trolley for balance, the other holding Grey Rabbit, his favourite toy. Grey Rabbit went everywhere that Ali went. They were inseparable.

‘Papa, please!’ said Reyhan desperately.

Mehmet had pushed the trolley to the farthest end of the supermarket where the queues were the shortest. The toilets were at the entrance to the shop, now maybe a hundred metres away. Today there was no one else at checkout thirty and checkouts twenty-nine to twenty-seven were closed. Checkout thirty was self-service. Its fellow self-service checkouts stood clustered together near the entrance to the shop, in a semicircular huddle, but this one stood alone as though it had been exiled to the end for some unknown reason. Maybe it had been a prototype, but it worked well enough. It also meant he wouldn’t have to talk to anyone. Mehmet didn’t like speaking to people, even at checkout. Mehmet rarely spoke to anyone, even in his own language. He was a very shy person. His own English was extremely limited. He hardly ever had a chance to practise, though it was unlikely he’d have taken it if the opportunity arose. He spoke Turkish at work and at home. He lived in a self-created Turkish bubble. When he had the chance to go to a mosque he went to the Turkish Suleymaniye Mosque in Hackney.

He was in the UK illegally and he half expected, even though he knew it unlikely, the police to descend on him at any time. He was a worrier by nature and if he didn’t have anything concrete to fret about his mind would invent lurid, frightening scenarios. Right now, his mind was fully occupied with the fear that Reyhan was going to relieve herself on the shop floor. He could imagine the puddle spreading outwards beneath her on the non-absorbent tiles of the floor, wider and wider. People would stare and point. Maybe he’d be banned from the supermarket. Management would shout at him in English and he wouldn’t understand. He felt himself beginning to panic. Then there was the problem of his shopping. Half of his goods were in the trolley, the rest still on the black rubber of the conveyor belt.

Mehmet’s desperate gaze was met by a woman — he guessed she was a manageress — who he took to be Muslim, wearing a headscarf. She was standing near the checkout. Her staff name tag pinned to her top said Aisha. It was a comforting name. It was nice and traditional. There were several Aisha’s, or Ayse in Turkish spelling, in his own family. This one was in her late twenties, Mehmet guessed. He noticed she had a small horseshoe-shaped scar between her eyebrows. This slight blemish made her pleasant face seem even more trustworthy.

Mehmet was very tired. He worked a six-day week, fourteen hours a day, split shifts, in his cousin’s restaurant, and when the girl smiled at him and said, ‘I’ll look after him and the trolley for you,’ he barely hesitated. In Mehmet’s world, women looked after children, men worked; it was the natural order of things.

Maybe if he hadn’t been so exhausted, if he hadn’t been so convinced that Reyhan was about to go all over the supermarket floor, if the woman hadn’t been so transparently trustworthy, he wouldn’t have done what he did.

He smiled his thanks, picked up Reyhan and strode quickly back down the long line of checkouts to the toilets. Ali watched them go, his head cocked to one side, a quizzical expression on his small face. His small fingers curled around Grey Rabbit.

About five minutes later, not much more, Mehmet and Reyhan were returning to checkout thirty. At checkout twenty-five Mehmet felt a terrible constriction start in his stomach as if a giant invisible hand had begun to squeeze the life out of the core of his being. He picked his daughter up in his arms. She could feel the sudden tension in her father’s body and his grip tighten round her and she put her arms around his neck for comfort. His stride lengthened and then became a run. He stopped short by the self-service checkout.

Checkout thirty was now deserted. There was no sign of his shopping. The manageress was gone. His trolley was gone. His son was gone. He gently put Reyhan down and stared around him in bewildered disbelief. His heart was racing and his mouth very dry. This can’t be happening. This can’t be happening. Momentarily he thought he was going to faint. Sweat broke out on his forehead and his heart started racing.

He looked around him, at the orderly shelves, the other customers. Surely, he thought, there has been some kind of mistake, some kind of mix-up. They must be round here somewhere. He gently put Reyhan down on the floor.

He thought: Where is he?

He thought: This can’t be happening.

He thought: I don’t believe this.

He stood there, stupidly, his head swivelling left and right. Outside the huge, glass window of the supermarket, cars and people came and went, life continued, while Mehmet stood as if frozen in some kind of aquarium.

Reyhan stared at her father and then bent down and picked something up that had fallen out of Mehmet’s line of sight under the lip of the checkout. She could sense the tension in her father but wasn’t sure why. Perhaps this would help.

‘Look, Papa,’ she said brightly. ‘It’s Grey Rabbit.’

It was then Mehmet felt despair and fear hit him harder than he could ever have imagined. His son would never have been separated from his toy. He knew then with a terrible clarity that Ali was gone.