A Waste of Time (excerpt)

Short story in Nicosia Beyond Barriers: Voices from a Divided City. Saqi Books: London, 2019.

In 2016, the small island of Cyprus—population one million—had two time zones. The Turkish-occupied north followed Ankara in sticking with Daylight Savings Time, while the Greek Cypriot south turned its clocks back an hour.

He could feel the sweat clinging to his armpits as he made his way briskly to the checkpoint. He regretted wearing a shirt and blazer. The weather was much less chilly than his weather app had led him to believe, and he knew he would not escape the embarrassment of sweat patches under his arms, and probably on his chest, too.

Ledra Street was unusually quiet. It was early on a Monday afternoon and most people hadn't left their jobs yet. The cafes he passed by were almost empty, with the exception of a group of teenagers all huddled around a table at Starbucks, most of them smoking.

He was already late. They had set the meeting for 4:00pm. He left the office early, right after lunch, claiming he wasn't feeling well and needed to go to the doctor. He went home, took a long shower, and spent the good part of an hour trying to decide what to wear. The truth was he had felt so nervous all morning he hadn't done much work anyway.

He had never thought of himself as an adventurous person. He always assumed that his personal life would follow a predictable path, like his career. He studied Business Management in Leeds, then worked for four years at an audit firm in London, where he became a chartered accountant. He returned to Cyprus three years ago, and had worked at his uncle's accounting firm since.

When he first met Neşe he didn't know her name. His cousin had dragged him to a beginners' tango class. He told her that he didn't look like a person who danced tango, but she brushed him off. He was on the short side, slightly balding and the most fashionable item he owned was a brown leather sling-over briefcase his mother had bought for him in Milan two years ago.

His cousin insisted they had to go to support Natalie, their friend from high school, who had just returned from Buenos Aires with a tango teaching qualification. He went because he had nothing better to do, and didn't want to say not to her. They worked together and she was a loud person, and he knew better than to do anything that would put him in her bad graces.

Neşe was there with two other women. She towered above them, her long black hair tied in a thick ponytail behind her back. When the dancers rotated enough times for them to finally dance together, they were both too intent on looking at their feet, worried they would step on each other, to introduce themselves.

'Can you believe those three girls were Turkish Cypriot?' said his cousin early the following day.

He still hadn't taken the first sip of his morning coffee.

'Not that I care or anything. I just wish I knew because I haven't met a Turkish Cypriot before.'

That first sip went a long way.

'Which girls?'

'The tall one, with the other two.'

He knew immediately who his cousin was talking about. That gave him a first lead.

'Apparently her name's Neşe. Neşe! That's cool, right? She's friends with Natalie.'

Later that afternoon he went on the tango school's Facebook page and started searching for her. She was easy to find. Her profile picture showed a big, thick braid running down the middle of her back. He couldn't bear the thought of messaging her directly so he scanned the page for a comment she might have made, or a picture she was tagged in.

He found one of her and Natalie from 2014 at the tango school's entrance. 'Can't get this one to start dancing!' said the caption. He couldn't comment on that; it would make him look like a creep. He liked the page and logged out of Facebook. He decided to continue learning tango.

When he went to the class the following week, Neşe wasn't there. He left the studio as soon as the class was over, ignoring Natalie's invitation to go out for drinks with the rest of the group.

At home, he fell on the couch without having a shower, took his shoes off and started downloading the latest Liam Neeson movie. His phone pinged.

'Natalie says ur a really bad student for not coming out with us!'

He squinted to make out the thumbnail. It was Neşe. He sat up, his laptop falling to the floor. He typed and erased more than three different responses before settling on the least risky.

'Hey! wasn't feeling very well... U having fun?'

'Yes, it's OK. See u next week then!'

Fuck. His jaw clenched and he started grinding his teeth. He should've said something witty about her being the bad student for not showing up. Or something self-deprecating. He went to the kitchen, opened the fridge and grabbed three slices of cheddar cheese, putting all of them in his mouth at once. When he was done he went back to the couch and picked up his phone, mortified.

'See ya.'

The Liam Neeson movie was pretty shit. As the credits were rolling, his phone pinged again.

'Unless u want to have a coffee tmrw? It's my day off.'

They set a meeting point under the clocks in the north part of Nicosia, close to the Ledra checkpoint. He had never been there before, but didn't tell her. He planned on getting to the checkpoint fifteen minutes earlier, just in case he got lost and needed the extra time to find the place.

Instead he was late. He had spent too long in the shower, too long picking his outfit, which she wouldn't be able to tell anyway because he had sweated so much he looked like he'd come straight from work.

At the checkpoint he waited for ten minutes in the wrong queue. A group of German tourists were crossing from the north to the south and their excitement was causing a delay. When he finally got to the window of the police cubicle, the Greek Cypriot policeman laughed at him and pointed to another set of cubicles further along in the buffer zone.

'What, you haven't been here before? Go over there. And relax.'

He gave his ID to a Turkish Cypriot police woman and looked at his watch. 4:15pm. She stamped some papers and returned the ID. It was that simple. He followed Neşe’s instructions and walked in a straight line. They gave him a sense of purpose, hiding the fact that he had no idea where he was, even if this side of the checkpoint didn't seem all that different to the side he had just come from.

Only a few meters away from him was a small square, with a circle of benches around a post with many signs on it. Each sign was a different color, and they all pointed in different directions, leading to places he didn't know. The only place name he recognized was that of Büyük Han.

Above the benches he saw the outlines of three big clocks. He assumed this was the right place and immediately started looking around for Neşe. She wasn't sitting on any of the benches. She wasn't looking at things to buy at the nearby merchant stalls. She wasn't standing in line for a coffee at any of the many coffee shops in the square.

She had probably left. Fifteen minutes is a long time to wait for someone you hardly know. He sat on the bench closest to him, facing a narrow street lined with tables of souvenirs. He brought his palms to the sides of his face, trying to relax his jaw by massaging the joints under his ears with his fingers. He looked at his watch. 4:23pm. He opened the Messenger app on his phone, and started typing: 'Hey, I was late...Sorry I missed u. I'm here now if ur around.' He decided not to send it.

He would wait until 5:00pm. This whole story had been too good to have happened to him anyway. He should've known that it wouldn't work out. He was average, plain, not particularly adventurous… He just hadn't expected it to end this quickly. He bent his head forward and then back, trying to ease the tension in his neck. Two bean-shaped sweat patches had formed on his chest, one on each side.

At 4:55pm he stood up to leave. He looked around one last time. He dragged his feet to the checkpoint on the opposite side of the street and gave his ID. He hadn't noticed that the clocks in the square read 5:55pm.