Deep Waters Read Free Page A

we’ll all be dead within seconds. And that will include little Squeaky and his fucking little wheel!’
    ‘Oh?’ His wife, rising slowly from her crouched position, put her hands on her hips and looked Çetin İkmen straight in the eye. ‘If it’s that bad, why won’t you let us move to another city? Well?’
    İkmen, his usually thin patience stretched to its limit, exploded. ‘We’ve discussed this! The whole country’s on a fucking fault line, where in the—’
    ‘Konya isn’t. I’ve looked at where the faults are on a map. It’s a very safe place. They need good policemen there. You could apply.’
    ‘Oh, I could, Fatma, yes.’ He moved his thin body forward to meet her more voluptuous form. ‘But,’ he suddenly and violently flung his arms high above his head, ‘for an atheist drinker like me, life in our most religious city would be like a living death. I would far rather face the earthquake and die quickly than endure so much as a day in that place!’
    ‘But the children, Çetin,’ his wife pleaded, her hands held in what appeared to be a gesture of supplication against his chest. ‘What of the children?’
    Just for a moment, it seemed to Fatma that her husband was, unusually, lost for words. His breath came in gulps, his face visibly changed from white to grey before Fatma’s eyes; a change that caused her to place a concerned hand upon his cheek. He’d been this colour the day after the big earthquake, the day when his friend Dr Arto Sarkissian had ‘joked’ that if all the cardiograph machines in the city had not been either destroyed or in use, he’d really like to hook Çetin up to one for a while. And that was before they’d received the news about one of Çetin’s colleagues’ horrific injuries. After that, Fatma clearly recalled, her husband had cried in his sleep.
    ‘Çetin . . .’ she began.
    ‘I just don’t think that the children will get what they need in a place like Konya,’ he said, slightly mollified by his wife’s soothing touch. ‘I haven’t worked like a slave all these years to see my younger children waste themselves in the country. All the older ones want to stay here anyway and,’ he sighed deeply and with tremendous weariness, ‘oh, I just feel that I’d rather we were all together somehow. I mean, how would you feel if we left here with the little ones and then the quake came and Sınan, Orhan, Çiçek and Bülent all died? I mean—’
    ‘Don’t!’ As if blocking out these hypothetical events, Fatma put her hand up to what was on the point of becoming a tear-stained face. ‘Don’t talk of such things, Çetin! Allah was so merciful to this family last time. It must have been written that we should all be spared.’
    ‘And anyway, how we would afford to move to another city, I don’t know.’ Çetin placed a loving hand on Fatma’s shoulder. ‘My brother has paid for so much that this family has needed, I can’t ask him for anything more.’
    With tears still standing in her eyes, Fatma wrapped her arms round her husband’s neck. She squeezed him as tightly as her plump stomach would allow, and received a comfortingly familiar kiss on the back of the neck.
    ‘Oh, Çetin,’ she whispered softly just in case one of the children might be passing the door of their room and hear what she was about to say. ‘I’m so scared all the time! Every time one of the children bounces on the floor, my heart flies into my throat thinking it might be the earthquake again. Sometimes my heart can take hours to settle down and,’ she pulled his head out of her hair so that she could see into his eyes, ‘sometimes I think I’m going to have a heart attack because of all this – that or go mad!’
    Çetin smiled and then kissed her lightly on the cheek. ‘You know, I think that for once I must advise you to take refuge in your religion, my darling. If you leave things like earthquakes in the hands of Allah, it means you can kind of hand the worry about