Mangal II won’t be around forever. Nothing lasts, and neither will we. I’ll be in my late-40’s one day, sell up and move to the coast to be away from everyone so I can write short stories no one will ever read. I’ll cash it all in and fuck off into the sunset. Sayonara, bitches! Adios! Güle güle!
Until then… hi! You know us, how we look from the front, inside. The sign and the setting. The décor and ambience. The food and the drinks. What you don’t see is the back, the ugly rear of Mangal II. The private alley you’re not exposed to unless you are indeed a delinquent loitering around the back streets of Dalston.
In this piece, I want to list the wildest things I’ve witnessed around the pit of my restaurant throughout the years. The contrast between Stoke Newington Road where the entrance to our home is located and the back of the building where we take out the rubbish, could only be explained in terms of the disparity of wealth in New Delhi/Rio de Janeiro with the contrast of skyscrapers overlooking slums. An exaggeration, naturally, but bear with me.
Firstly, there is no council rubbish collection services applicable to the back. Apparently, with it being private land, it is exempt from our business rates and waste disposal being put to any good use. Seeing as new builds have been erected in this strange no-man’s-land over the last 20 years, it has led to poor unsuspecting residents living in what I feel is quite possibly the worst patch of land in London. The trade-off with being able to say you live in Dalston with the harsh reality of not being able to dispose your domestic waste in any civilised capacity must be very humbling. What’s more humbling, is that often these people – amongst them doctors, solicitors, will dump their rubbish outside the perimeter of our garden. Heaps of black bin bags filled with food waste, tampons and nappies, piling up for days until we’re forced to have to call the local authorities to come and do something about it. Look, I get it. If I were conned into moving into a 1-bed flat in a hip part of town and only retrospectively realised no one will actually dispose the crap I want nothing to do with, despite paying stupendous amounts of council tax every month, I’d want to dump my shit somewhere, anywhere, too. Don’t hate the player, hate the game, and all that.
So, there’s that. The crap that inhabits the space. A wasteland. A source of irritation with no solution. A shit pie. The slum of all evils.
This is a weekly disturbance that I’ve strangely become immune to. It has stopped infuriating me – I’m now desensitized to it. Stockholm syndrome, perhaps. Held captive by a nonplussed council and private landlords. My frustrations drowned out by the stench of rubbish that overrides any sensitivities to the situation.
Then, there are the blowjobs.
The number of times I’ve left work, knackered, 2am, dying to go home and collapse to sleep, and I walk out the back and see an old man and an old woman going at it, against the wall, trousers down, knees bent, then the inevitable shock of seeing me and a quick jump up, belt latched, sudden flee – and the sheer look of horror and disgust on my face whilst I shout “OI, WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING?!”. It’s happened more than 3 times, 3 times too many. Shacklewell Lane has long been a notorious red light district, something I’d witness from childhood as my dad would drive me home from working a Saturday shift with him as a 12 year old and see the sex workers patrolling the little bit of green in the middle of the road. That activity has on occasion spilled over to the back street of Mangal II, where someone’s uncle would be paying someone’s aunt some fee for something that’s (publicly) gross. It gets worse, I once saw a woman taking a shit outside the back against our fence. Literally squatting down shitting. No toilet paper, nothing. It still haunts me. In a pre-Covid world. A simpler time, a more innocent time, where you could squat + shit as you pleased, apparently.
I’ve seen numerous, countless fights at the back. The back is surrounded by THREE, yes, THREE, Kurdish illegal gambling dens. One road, 3 establishments filled with degenerate men who waste away their money until 6 in the morning every day. Naturally, this often leads to conflict between fellow gamblers who take exception to someone either cheating, or not paying up, or insulting them over the dealer’s table. It boils to a “Come outside, come on” type of schoolboy bravado where 2 middle-aged big-bellied Kurdish men try and aim a swing at one another. A lot of homoerotic grappling ensues (just kiss already, guys), followed by allies trying to break up their sexual tension by dragging them against the brick wall to muzzle them from further embarrassing themselves. It’s happened a lot, and as sad as it is because these men clearly have addictions which haven’t been dealt with, it’s always quite funny and pathetic.
And then there’s Musa.
Musa was a shoeshiner. He’d been around forever, from as far back as I can remember. Since early childhood up until my early 30s I remember him walking up and down Stoke Newington Road with his metal box of polish and shoe brushes, stopping every fellow Turk/Kurd to ask if they want their black leather shoes polished for a fiver. I knew Musa because my dad knew Musa. We’d give him food most nights as he’d swing by the end of a shift asking if we had any soup going. He’d receive his favourite free dinner of bulgur rice and lentil soup with bread and a plastic spoon in a carrier bag, which he’d proceed to eat around the back. Musa was relentless. Every time he’d see me walking up and down the road he’d hound me. He’d run into traffic just to cross the road to confront me, begging for a fiver. More often than not, out of sheer embarrassment that a man older than my dad was asking 20-year-old me for money, I’d rummage through my pocket for whatever change I had spare. Initially annoyed by this targeting, I grew empathetic towards him, and even, in time, struck up a cordial friendship with Musa. One thing I never did, though, was allow him to shine my shoes. That felt a step too far, too demeaning. It’s a job my own dad did as a poverty-stricken 7-year-old in inner-Anatolia. I couldn’t bear the idea of allowing anyone to shine or brush my trainers for me – even though after being handed money he’d insist on doing it, I’d always deny the opportunity.
Musa was homeless.
Musa, as far back as I could recall, was always homeless. Before we built a fenced-off garden around the back of Mangal II, it was a bit of a scrappy parking space. Uninhabited, vacant, and gross. And there’s where Musa eventually set up his home for a good long year. He settled there and we didn’t bother him and he didn’t bother us. It’s not our building, we’re not the owners, not my hill, not my battle. The landlord to our building, however, and for sake of anonymity let’s call her ‘Karen’, was apoplectic. Karen was furious. Not the most sympathetic creature by nature (the very same Karen who made us pay up all rent during Covid despite us receiving no income as we couldn’t trade, and despite us being her tenants for over 25 years), this situation was not something she could tolerate. She came to me begging for assistance to get rid of him. She called him many, many bad words. To be fair, Musa gave it back as good as he got. I simply refused to get involved. I preferred Musa over Karen. I trusted Musa. I liked Musa. Not my hill, not my battle. So, she got the council involved. It took a year, but eventually they got Musa to move – putting him in temporary accommodation in West London. When I found out, I was happy for Musa – to finally have a roof over his head. Musa, however, did not feel the same. Now he was enraged. “All my business is in Dalston – these motherfuckers have made my commute to work impossible.” I didn’t even consider this position, how seriously he took his shoeshining. I felt stupid, looking at things through a lens that Musa couldn’t understand. More important than a home was his ability to work, to function, to have a purpose.
Musa still made the trip to Dalston every day. Until he finally came back for good. He set up his final shop, his final home on the bus stop outside Beyond Retro in Stoke Newington Road. I saw him there at the end of the first lockdown. Sleeping with piles of rubbish, his left foot exposed with no shoe on, full of gangrene and rot. His skin purple. A crowd of people were gathered around him. He refused to speak to anyone. Someone was calling the ambulance, another the police. I pushed through the crowd and knelt down and spoke to him. He said “I don’t want to go to no fucking hospital”. I replied “Musa, you look very sick, please just go. Let them take care of you. Please.”
His final words to me were “Ferhat, let me just die here. I want to die here”.
He never got in that ambulance.
3 days later, Musa died.
And I guess, a small part of me and my connection to the back of the restaurant died there, too. That’s why I always look forward, never back. Nothing good comes out of the back. Just shit.