Aylin

by Billy O'Callaghan



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    All those summer nights while Aylin slept, I'd sit up at the wide-open window of our hotel's fourth-floor room, suffocating from the melancholic boiling-point stillness of the early hour, thinking about who I was and some of the places I'd been, and about the stories I was writing or intending to write, switching on a small flash-light whenever the words knitted themselves together in usable rhythms and scribbling in small frenzied bursts into my notebook, shielding the light's small glow with my body so as not to disturb her slumber. Between sentences, I'd roll and smoke cigarettes of a local tobacco that burnt my tongue, and stare out over the empty four-lane road, with the Nile a shining blackness just beyond and beyond that, folded into the dusty hills, the graveyard Valleys of the Kings and Queens. We'd intended Luxor as a mere pit-stop, with our minds tuned more southerly. Aswan; then Wadi Halfa for the great temples of Abu Simbel; then onto Khartoum, and from there, if we were still able, trailing the Blue Nile down into Ethiopia and Lake Tana. Our drifting lacked specifics, though, and Luxor was a small-town city that seemed to embrace and encourage laziness. It was a soft compromise that indulged us with stifling days, stories ancient beyond old, multitudes of things to do and see at sauntering pace, and faces worth our watching. Even better, we had a room in which to shelter from the sun, in an outskirts hotel cheap even to our limited budget, basic in terms of luxury but with water enough to shower and time and room enough to stretch out with one another when the days really began to burn, whispering poetry and songs for one another into the lazy, love-whetted afternoons. 
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    Time doesn't heal, it blurs. Details lose their definition and seep together, and that's how it has to be, if we are to survive the lashes of our worst mistakes. Yet there remains the occasional outlier moment that keeps every sense of itself immaculately preserved. Memories of Aylin are fistfuls of tide sometimes shining with beauty, sometimes salty as tears. I can treasure them because of how we parted without war, but knowing that also heightens the sadness at having lost her. And even these years on, one night in particular remains my diamond, the last we spent together.

    Earlier that day, out of some guilt or sudden sensed panic, she had called home from the hotel lobby. Needing, she said, to assure those she'd left behind that the wild Irishman hadn't yet chopped her into little pieces or sold her as stock to some rich Arab, and that this was just an adventure, her moment of twenty-three year old madness ahead of the shackles that'd soon enough be buckling her down again for the September beginning of a new university term. Seven weeks of road down from Ankara that were already, a fortnight in, passing in a blink, a lightning strike. But think of the world she was seeing, just think of the poems she'd write. All of it, she said, fuel for her inferno.

    I was beside her when she began to cry and, as I watched, seemed to crumple, her legs, bare and brown beneath the high white cotton hem of her skirt, suddenly losing their structure, and I caught her and went to the floor with her, to soften the landing. Still with the phone's receiver to her ear she pressed her face into my chest, and even as I felt the wetness of her cheeks through my shirt and the shudder of her breath against my heart, a hard clanging bell-voice continued to ring from the earpiece, a delirious flow made small and shrewish by the thousand separating miles of distance.

    “My father has died,” she sobbed, looking up at me, her silver-green eyes wide with shock. “His heart.”

    Missing the words she needed, I could only stare back.

    “I'm coming,” she answered, remembering the phone, then repeated it in Turkish, “Geliyorum, ana,” almost screaming.

    The young man at the reception desk stood in silence until he could be of help. From what I could gather, he was the only staff member entrusted with manning the lobby; women were employed in the hotel, too, but as cleaners, mainly, and dishwashers – rough types, but also one young girl of no more than early teens, with the stunned expression of having had an animal's kick leave some permanent inner mark, that I'd a couple of times glimpsed dragging her badly-lame right leg around some corridor corner or through a doorway. This desk clerk was young, too, twenty, if even that, spidery and bone-thin with a look more Indian than Arabic, the charcoal smear of moustache making less of his years rather than the clearly hoped-for opposite. Decked out in a crisp white shirt threadbare to a close look along the cuff edges but clean as ice and more than acceptable to a casual glance, and with a name-tag pinned just above his heart that read, Hamdi, he watched us while we sat in our spill on the worn-tiled floor, Aylin's gaze wide and dead, the phone held forgotten against her thigh, that stabbing bell voice still popping from the earpiece. And when, after a minute or two, the sound changed, the line falling into a long dead squeal, his eyes met mine.

    “It's already very hot,” he whispered, as if these were the right words for the moment, and understanding that he'd rolled a dice in his mind and had turned up this phrase ahead of any other, I nodded that it was, yes, which seemed to give him permission to take charge. Calls were made, notes scribbled. Aylin leaned half against me and half onto the desk, her lips whispering silences and her green eyes lacquered with shock, until after an interminable wait Hamdi succeeded in fixing her with a flight to Ankara, changing in Cairo, the best he could manage, for the following morning at nine. Dealing with bookings, emphasising to whoever sat on the other end of the line the emergency nature of the situation and doing what he could to haggle on price, confirming the passport number, and finally even arranging for a car to be here for her just before seven, so that she'd have ample time to get checked in. That I might accompany her was not even considered, by any of us, even after Aylin and I had returned to our room and I sat on one sagging corner of the bed while shed gathered what few belongings she had into her small khaki rucksack, her jaw set hard enough to make a drawn line of her mouth, her eyes so wide and distant as to be already as good as gone from me.

    And then, because there was nothing left to do but wait, she folded herself into my arms and I held her, giving her a safe place to weep, taking the tears from her cheeks and eyelids with kisses only meant as gentle. At some point in that embrace we slipped out of our clothes, showered for a long time, standing under the nub of rusted pipe jutting from the bathroom wall, letting the tepid, slow-running water coat us and heal, until finally we were breathing wetly and whispering to one another, as if we were children full of secrets in the dark instead of consenting adults with nothing left between us, all that hadn't already been confessed. Remembering Ankara, that first night together in what had been only the latest then of my slum hotel rooms, drenched, the pair of us, from having escaped a thunderous storm, our mouths sour from raki and the Guinness we'd found on tap in an English-owned backstreet pub, she dizzy and I high, I dried her from the shower, lifted her and carried her back through to the hard Luxor bed to very slowly finish what for us had become a kind of prayer, to god but to everything else too, maybe to life, and death, or life in the face of death, in defiance of it. And when after a time I felt her clench and her breath groaning insistence from low in her throat, I kept on, resisting the urge to chase her down, and kissed her neck for its pulse and then the bones of her face, making a map of her, wanting suddenly to always remember the way: the skin of her arms and collarbones cool still from the shower and smooth as wax; the small pinch of her trimmed nails digging crescents into my flesh; the deep entrapment of her gaze, terrified and in love, her pupils iridescent, sandy-edged blues and greens, great Egyptian colours, great pharaonic eyes.

    Afterwards, while she drifted into sleep, I spoke of all the things that during those minutes I meant with the whole of my heart, and about how if in a week or two or five or six, or ever, she had need of me again, she'd find me waiting. And if the situation changed here and I had to move on, she could be assured of a call from wherever I washed up, Khartoum, Addis Ababa, even Dar es Salaam ahead of Zanzibar, the plan as long as nothing else happened to slow the road and what money I had continued to stretch. If there was even the slightest chance of her coming back then I'd wait, wherever I was and for as long as she needed, so that we could see the places together, but in the meantime, I'd dream of her.

    Saying that, whispering, as if it could ever be enough.


    Hours later, I woke with a start, incomprehensibly upset, to the yellowish dark of dawn having broken, and the bed on her side empty. Her rucksack was gone from the corner and her clothes from where they'd draped the back of the room's only chair, and for a minute I held myself still beneath the silence, afraid of coming apart. I'd wanted so much to be able to say a proper goodbye, to sit with her and hold her hand. But I suppose that, sometimes, the way things are is the best way.

    That early, the heat was already sickening. A thin grey cotton sheet clung to my legs and I peeled it away and lay there naked, breathing fire, with my right arm outstretched across the bed for the void that had opened up. A three-winged fan hung from the centre-point of the ceiling, the nearest a hotel as down-at-heel as this got to air conditioning, but running it made the sound of a hand-pushed lawnmower, and silence, even of the stifling sort, felt the better option.

    Because of the stillness I was almost able to believe that Aylin had simply left our bed for the bathroom and would, any moment now, re-emerge to slip again into my arms. I even found myself waiting for that, until the minutes began to stretch and the air started to find and hold its light, and something moved in me, like a wall coming down. 

    Those are times everyone has lived, when instead of pushing away the hurt you reach for it. I thought about Aylin, sitting in a taxi, pale from lack of sleep and made slight in her numbness. Or, at the airport, standing in line and then trying to make herself understood to the ticketing attendant, her voice hollowed out from crying, filling gaps and shortcomings in her English with hand movements and facial gestures. And finally, having found her gate, slumping down into a hard plastic chair, the hour's wait ahead of the boarding announcement meaningless to her now because a sun had exploded somewhere in her heavens, causing the world to cease its spin. I kept seeing her as I felt sure she must have been, eyes wide, mouth slatted, every young crease emphasised, every detail of her face compacted by a grief unutterable in its magnitude, while her fingers picked at the cuticles of her nails or twisted the ring she wore on her left index finger, gold with a small embedded emerald stone, a gift years back from the man she was returning home to now to kiss goodbye and bury.


    I got up some while later, pulling on the clothes I'd worn the day before, loose canvas trousers, pale grey muslin shirt, sandals, and went to sit at the open window, with the world outside coming to life, the sky easing out of its shabby dark, the air ancient and alive with its own flavour, distinct but unidentifiable, caught somewhere between fruit and spice. Out ahead, the Nile ran slow, sluicing through the rushes of its near bank, the water once brightness established itself a shade of blue that was almost silver and almost gold, the bare hills beyond already in the early light the seared yellow of dust; and I kept taking air, thinking about how we're all of us broken in our different ways, and can only be, if we've at all lived, we limp when we have to in order to balance the pain and curl up in dark corners until the fire of day draws us once more to its warmth. Nothing is lost, only that which we choose to set aside. Because in the end it's about survival, and keeping on.

    Morning filled the world with a call to prayer, a loud, masculine, static-laden tone that pulsed melodious and elongated from some unseen minaret across city blocks, repeating in a series of slight contractions toward a climax. A sound haunting in its foreignness, at once beautiful and fearsome, and I closed my eyes and let it in, wanting the sense of authenticity, and for it to mean something. Within half a minute it had become part of the air, part of the sky's chalky blueness and the city's first stirring din. Then, when it again fell away, I looked around the room, at the tossed bed, the jug of water on the locker alongside two upturned glasses, and understood, without even needing to decide, that it was time for me to go.

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Billy O'Callaghan, from Cork, Ireland, is the author of four novels and four short story collections.

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​​​​​​​​​​​​​​SHARE - Issue: 1.8 / April 2026