He always looked forward to arriving at his place of work and would always see something new to pique his interest. But today, he didn’t have time to indulge in this passion, he reminded himself, because today they were unveiling several large mosaics as well as the new face of the Grand Dome. Today, he had to get ready for the President, the Prime Minister and the Minister of Culture and Tourism along with their entourages and the world’s press. He hated these public showcases, but he was astute enough to realise that they generated the interest necessary to attract the funds from the country’s coiffeurs to enable him to continue his restoration work. So today he would press the flesh, smile at the cameras and answer all the questions the journalists put to him, because tomorrow he could stand here again and marvel at the exquisite craftsmanship of true artisans from an era long forgotten by most people.
As Hamil Sadik was arriving at his office, Giyas Macar was already halfway through his working day. He had been woken by his father at 2 am, as he had been every morning since leaving school the previous year. At the age of 16, and without any qualifications to his name, it was inevitable that he would be joining his father on the small fishing boat that had been passed down to him by his father. When his father eventually retired, through ill-health rather than choice, Giyas would become the proud owner of a rather dilapidated trawler.
A great deal had changed since his grandfather’s time: over-fishing, increase in maritime traffic, light pollution from the city, global warming and water pollution. Whatever the cause, tuna and swordfish were now extinct from these waters.
Giyas could still remember the stories his grandfather used to tell him as a boy, about how they’d caught gigantic tuna and swordfish and how the best restaurants in the city would fight to get the freshest catch, as soon as they’d docked, to serve to their European clientele. He recalled his grandfather telling him about the time he’d caught an enormous swordfish in his nets; so big was this monster of a fish, that the boat nearly capsized when he started to drag it in and he had to cut it loose. Fishermen’s stories maybe, but that’s all they had to remind themselves of the prosperous times.
All they could hope to catch these days were lüfer, a popular fish amongst the locals, but even their numbers were dwindling year by year. A lot of the other fishermen had given up altogether, turning their boats into private fishing vessels for the tourists. However, his father had told him on numerous occasions that it would be a cold day in hell before he hung up his nets and pampered to the spoilt, rich tourists. He had used a lot more expletives to convey his views, but the sentiment was the same.
Giyas’s scrawny muscles ached from the sea-sodden weight of the nets as he threw them over the side, whilst the weather-beaten figure of his father stooped over the wheel, trying to steer a straight course through the pounding waves. He was distracted by the sound of a helicopter above him and looked up just as a wave came crashing over the side, knocking his puny frame off-balance and showering him in icy water. He regained his foothold and continued to let out the nets, ignoring the sound of the rotor blades as they passed by; he had to concentrate on getting the lines out straight, as their meagre catch so far today wouldn’t even pay for the fuel they had used, let alone be enough to support the family. He prayed for a bountiful catch.
Traffic Dawn’s day had started as unremarkably as any other. That wasn’t her real name, of course, but it hadn’t stopped some bright spark in the office giving her a nickname the first day she started her new job as Airborne Dawn Traffic Correspondent for the only English-speaking radio station in Istanbul — Radyo KO. The executives picked up on it and created a natty little jingle which Dawn — or Maria Spencer, which was her real name — hated, ‘Traffic Dawn, your eye in the sky’.
One advantage of working for a radio station as opposed to a TV channel was that she could quite easily leave the Traffic Dawn persona at the station and slip back into her true identity once she had finished for the day and nobody, apart from her friends, would be any the wiser. But that was all the advantages she could think of.
From as far back as she could remember, she had wanted to be a TV presenter. Growing up in the UK, she had always been fascinated by children’s programmes — not for their content, but the way the presenters interacted with their audiences, captivating impressionable little minds with stories and poems, or making useful things out of everyday household items. She had applied to as many TV channels as she could, once she’d finished her degree in Communication Studies, but nobody was hiring without experience. One helpful rejection letter suggested that she should try radio work and, once she’d served her apprenticeship there, then they may consider her for a role in TV.
Her Turkish mother and English father split up the day she graduated from university; they later told her that they hadn’t been getting on for years and were ‘Just waiting for the right time’ before going their separate ways — she back to Ankara in Turkey and he back to his alter ego, namely a transvestite called Monica. It was whilst visiting her mother that she met one of the sound engineers from the radio station, in a local bar, who told her about a vacancy for a ‘roving reporter’ based in Istanbul. He went into far too much detail about how the station he worked for was part of a network of phantom stations scattered throughout the country, all sharing the one resource in Ankara to save on costs. And, with modern technology the way it was, as long as you had ‘Eyes on the ground’, as he described it, the unsuspecting listener was none the wiser that their ‘local’ radio station was actually being broadcast from a modern office building in the country’s capital.
The next morning, she phoned the number he had given her and was ecstatic when they asked her to come in for an interview. Her euphoria dissipated somewhat when they told her that the position for the ‘eyes on the ground’ reporter for Istanbul had already been filled, but there was still a vacancy for ‘eyes in the air’, which would entail reporting on the state of the city’s traffic from a helicopter. Her enthusiasm was dampened even more by the fact that she would be expected to be on air from 6 am to 6 pm, six days a week. But, with little else going on in her life, and at the tender age of 24 with nothing to lose, she accepted the role when it was offered to her.
She was now sitting next to Devrim, a rather rotund agency pilot with a wandering eye and a penchant for Top Gun. Unfortunately for him, the mirrored Ray Bans and slick-backed black hair made him look more like a Sicilian gangster than Tom Cruise. He’d asked her out on a date, the first time they’d flown together, which she politely declined, stating that she just wasn’t ready for a relationship. She didn’t consider herself unattractive, with her long wavy blonde hair and slim figure that she’d inherited from her mother (or was it Monica?), and she could certainly do better than the letch beside her, but for the time being she was concentrating on her career. There were worse jobs than hers, she consoled herself, spotting a small fishing boat being buffeted by the waves some 500 feet below them.
‘There, to your left. I can see a line of brake lights,’ she said into her mike, as she scanned the main arterial roads in and out of Istanbul for any signs congestion.