The Eunuch's Ward (The String Quartet)

by Smyth, Silver

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘Beauty salon,’ I said haughtily. I was trying to make it sound as close as possible to none of you bloody business, but the attempt failed miserably. Bakir was impervious to my rudeness.

  At 10.30 in the morning I descended to the garage and cheerfully skipped to the P1 section. My parents’ cars were neatly parked side-by-side, Bakir’s battered green Jeep stood guard behind them. My Lotus Evora gleamed in her red metallic glory in splendid isolation, her nose turned to the exit. It wasn’t parked apart from the others to show her off. Truth be told, I was scared stiff of scratching her or bumping into one of the other vehicles. I would have never lived it down.

  The top was down already. Bakir was sitting in the passenger seat, reading the user manual. His canvas camouflage hat was pulled low down his forehead to stop it from flying off during the ride.

  ‘Was there enough milk for your cornflakes?’ he asked without lifting his eyes of the booklet. ‘I’ll get some more on the way back.’

  I wished he held it upside down. At least I could have ridiculed him instead of putting on a display of indignation to someone who wasn’t even looking at me. ‘Or, maybe, I could drop you off on King’s Road. You can easily pick up some there and walk back or call a taxi.’

  He didn’t answer. I sulked for the rest of the way.

  Annoyingly, once we got there, it was actually quite handy to have him around. The girl on the phone had told me that there was a car park at the back. Not only that she exaggerated, the so-called car park was little more than a back yard accessible through an uncomfortably narrow entrance, the space was fully taken up by two repair vans, both belonging to the local water company.

  ‘Go in,’ Bakir ordered. ‘I’ll find somewhere... Text me when you’re done.’

  ‘I may be some time,’ I fired back ungratefully.

  I was left in the Blanche’s capable hands, as the raven-haired proprietor with a weakness for botox put it. Blanche was a good looking woman in her forties, seemingly free from makeup or any other interventions. Her teeth may have been veneered or else she was naturally blessed with perfect ivories that she didn’t flash uncomfortably often.

  So far so good.

  Ignacio, my regular hairdresser, the protégé of Monty, my mother’s stylist, would have never forgiven me if I let anyone else touch my long tresses. He’d taught me how to plait them, how to pin them up, how to show them off without looking too old, too affected, too cheap or too severe. I therefore only booked a pedicure, a foot massage and leg and bikini wax.

  I pulled out my own design from my bag. It was a product of a long and hard effort, a cardboard cut-out in the shape of a crescent.

  ‘Can you do this?’

  Blanche nodded. ‘We’ll be doing a Brazilian, I take it?’

  ‘Yes,’ I agreed quietly. I had no idea what a Brazilian was. I’d had bikini wax done before, only it didn’t have a name and I got to keep my knickers on.

  She placed my feet in a bowl of warm, soapy water that smelled of orange blossom and encased my bottom and genitals in hot wet towels. My reaction surprised me. The only way I could describe it was instant sexual arousal that lingered even as the terry cloth slowly cooled down. I wondered if my red face would betray me but Blanche was busy with wax strips on my legs. She was good and I’d had it done so many times before that it didn’t hurt any longer.

  ‘Let me change your nappies,’ she smiled when she’d finished swathing my legs with baby oil. ‘It’ll make it less painful for you afterwards.’

  The second lot of hot towels made me randy again. Under the white modesty sheet that Blanche had thrown over me, my hand crept down towards my clitoris and discreetly I started rubbing it with the hot, wet terry fabric. I had been a sworn enemy of DIY jobs, and I still was. But, oh boy, that felt good. A little too good.

  Blanche was pushing back the cuticle on my toenails. ‘I can give Bernard a shout if you wish...’

  I nearly died. ‘No, no...’

  ‘Don’t be embarrassed. Happens all the time. Bernard is very good, very clean too. And his prices are reasonable. Shame to miss.’

  I thanked her and declined as prettily as I knew how. In spite of excruciating pain inflicted by the Brazilian, the rest of the session went off in a haze.

  When she was done, Blanche brought me a mirror. ‘Is that what you had in mind?’

  Still embarrassed, I nodded.

  She produced a gold-coloured eye-liner with a gold-coloured tip. ‘Let me show you something. Before your date, paint this thinly on the bottom row of hairs,’ she drew the pen lightly along the inside curve arched a quarter of an inch above my clitoris. She then used an eyebrow brush and run it upwards from the coloured line. ‘It lasts a few dates, it doesn’t dissolve in water, it doesn’t colour your partner’s genitals or... it’s not toxic... it’s kiss proof. Do you like it?’

  The effect was very subtle but effective. My natural hair colour was chestnut brown. Nicely warm chestnut brown, I liked to think. The sparing, discrete gold speckles made it vibrant.

  ‘The speckles match your eyes now,’ Blanche smiled again. ‘Keep the pencil.’

  I thanked her profusely and left her a large tip. She more than deserved it.

  * * *

  Bakir pulled up to the kerb as I stepped out on the pavement.

  I greeted him with the brightest of smiles. ‘Let’s not go straight back. Let’s have coffee and cake at Kaffein.’

  ‘Plenty of coffee at home,’ he growled in his high-pitched soprano. If you haven’t heard a soprano castrato growl, you should. You really should. It’s priceless. ‘Half the plate of black wooden goat in the fridge, too.’

  ‘You mean black forest gâteau,’ I laughed. Cruelty comes so naturally when you’re young. It wasn’t that I didn’t feel sorry for him. The fact that he’d been raped and castrated here, in this country as an adult made things worse for some reason. But, I hated feeling sorry for people. It was so undignified. Making fun of him was more like a compliment. More in the way that I would have been making fun of a baby brother if I had one.

  ‘Seeing that my parents are apparently the most loved up married couple in the world, how come that I’m an only child, Bakir?’ That sounded like a suitably grownup question. I would have given my left arm to be able to place my order in the style of My usual, please Bob, and a lemonade for my friend, the way regulars did. I watched two men come to the door, shout Hi Bob! and park themselves on the bench outside. A few minutes later they were given what they came for plus a friendly little chat with the waitress.

  Bakir and I drank our lemonade and nibbled on walnut toast at the bar.

  ‘It is odd, isn’t it?’ I persisted.

  He just shrugged. ‘You may not like them. You don’t choose family.’

  ‘Maybe, but that’s not the point,’ I muttered. ‘Do you have siblings, Bakir?’

  ‘No more. My senior brother was a bad man. He was killed. I had no one else.’

  ‘And that’s why you were in the orphanage? Was it really bad there?’

  ‘They gave us food and clothes. We had to learn to read and write and numbers. If we didn’t we were caned. I was caned only two times, one for getting my sums wrong and again for ink on my book. Ink and books are expensive.’

  ‘And my dad?’

  Bakir drank some more of his lemonade and wiped off his mouth with the back of his hand. He then wiped off the back of his hand with the paper napkin. ‘He was teaching English.’

  That was news to me. ‘He was teaching you English?! Ghee whizz! How did he get to know any English?’

  ‘He had much knowledge. Knowledge earns you much money.’

  Bakir wasn’t a conversationalist. Idle chitchat wasn’t his style. I’d known that, but he was the only source of reliable information. After all, he’d been there from the start. From what my mother had told me, Bakir was around thirty seven, thirty eight years old. Certainly no more than forty. His appearance was ageless. His weight t
ook away his age, his facial expressions, even his moods. It couldn’t have taken away his memories. Then it dawned on me. That horrible event of eighteen years ago could have done exactly that. It could have caused a sort of amnesia, fuzziness about anything that had happened before. Mother didn’t know how much he’d remembered about the attack itself. He certainly hadn’t been much use to the police. No one had ever been caught. My father had done everything possible for him and Bakir had been repaying the kindness in unswerving loyalty to all of us, but none of that could have possibly replaced the life that he’d lost.

  ‘What’s your last name, Bakir?’

  He sprinkled some more sugar on the walnut toast. Bakir had a very sweet tooth. ‘Ganis,’ he said.

  I was loath to contradict him. With a good reason, he considered himself a member of the member. My father’s family. There was lump building in my throat. The poor man hadn’t just lost his looks, virility and lifestyle. He’d lost his entire identity.

  On the way back to the flat we talked about chess. There was a chess club in Ealing and Bakir was taking time off every Wednesday afternoon to play chess there with his friends.

  ‘You taught me chess when I was little, didn’t you?’ The memory struck me suddenly. Chess was a rainy day game at Hartsfield when I had no one to play with and there was nothing on TV.

  ‘I tried,’ Bakir smiled. I knew he smiled because his cheeks rolled up.

  ‘I wasn’t attentive enough. Sorry.’

  ‘Not attentive enough,’ he agreed.

  Back in my oversized pigeon loft I dashed off to the bathroom, stripped my clothes along the way and positioned myself in front of the mirror to admire my most intimate decoration. It was beautiful. The entire area underneath it was throbbing like mad.

  And all that passion was going to waste.

  It wasn’t fair and it wasn’t right.

  My exultation of the morning was turning sour. Bitterly, I turned the dial on the shower controls all the way down and stayed under the icy spray until it killed the very urge to live.

  Chapter 8

  I had passed three of my mock exams with much better results than I’d expected. There was only one left – the maths.

  I liked maths. I was crunching my way through the examples of questions from past exams, and Miss Zachary, my tutor lavished praise on me every week.

  ‘Have you chosen your university course yet, Sonata? What does your father say?’

  In the world where she and I lived the one who held the purse strings made the choices.

  ‘He wants to see the results of the mocks first. But, I was thinking of economics. Not sure which field, but if I take the foundation course first... What do you think?’

  She was nodding as I was speaking so I didn’t have to wait for her reply with bated breath. ‘Perfect. Go for it. I can’t see your parents objecting to that.’

  I agreed with her on that. I was more worried about the forthcoming summer holidays. I just couldn’t bear the thought going back to the Hartsfield House without even the relief of riding. The alternative was even worse. Father was planning an extended trip to Japan where he could mix business with pleasure. What he called pleasure was a prospect of endless public displays of family unity, smiling for the camera and admiring one garden design after another with free ikebana tuition thrown in.

  Me, my mother and our minders.

  Some holiday.

  The day after Miss Zachary’s tutorial, I gave myself a morning off.

  Ours was a corner building. The top flat occupied the north-east corner, leaving a lot of space for the terrace. When the weather was good, people who lived normal lives would pull open the French windows to the living room and invite the whole world to a party by the swimming pool. Dressed just in their wet swimwear, they could watch the traffic on the Thames with champagne flutes in their hands. I’ve never needed much space. I was never allowed to ask over more than eight people, all of them girls, all of them spending most of the time watching American comedy series on TV or taking distorted pictures of themselves and others with their phone cameras and sending them to their friends not fortunate enough to be invited. My invited friends were invariably daughters of people my father was wooing at the time, in other words, they rarely included Rosie, Asha or Ela. The three of them stayed here a few times for a sleepover after a West End show, or an entire weekend or two, and those were practically the only good memories that I had of the place.

  That morning, I swam for about half an hour, drank all the iced pomegranate juice that the Boys had left by the pool, and turned my lounger away from the harsh glare of the sun. The southern and northern walls of the terrace were waist high, perfect for admiring the vast cityscape below. The western wall that marked the border with building next door was as high as the roof and covered in wisteria and Virginia creeper. Once, years and years ago, I was about seven, something went wrong with the satellite dish. The repairman climbed up the ladder and I followed him. The cityscape didn’t look any different than from the terrace, but I caught my first glimpse of the penthouse next door.

  Like ours, it also had a pool and a lot of open space. A lot more greenery that we had. The table under an open umbrella was a large wooden affair with dining chairs around it. Our floor was white marble, theirs was tiled in the same colours as the pool. I watched a young, slim Indian woman in a midnight blue sari, dry a little boy with a large fluffy towel with orange octopus pattern on it. I was soon ordered to get down and I never saw the neighbouring terrace again. I thought that I saw the woman and the child again a few months later when I was watching the street at the back of the building. They were crossing over from the gardens and they had a man with them. The boy was on a bike, and the man walked right next to him until they reached the opposite pavement.

  At this height the sounds behave differently than at the ground level. The entire cacophony of the city life merges into a single canopy of noise and you stop hearing it altogether. Some still get through, of course, like the horns from the barges on the Thames, or the shrill and persistent whine of emergency vehicles, but I’d never heard the little boy splash in the pool or play with other kids as he must have been doing. I didn’t even know if they still lived there. We were quite an exception. My father had bought this place when I was still in prep school. Other people rarely stayed in flats like those for more than a year, usually as tenants who moved on when kids came along.

  I was reaching the end of that trivial memory when another one floated up on its tail. Again, it dated back to when I was little, quite possibly to my first visit to the penthouse. Behind my closed eyelids I could quite clearly see a man in orange overalls passing through that thick end wall. And quite possibly, it wasn’t even a memory. Just a memory of a dream. I used to have very vivid dreams when I was little. All the same I left my seat, walked over to the party wall and led by the vague memory tried to penetrate the thick growth of the climbers. It took me all of a quarter of an hour to detect it. The door. A heavy, metal gate with a recessed handle. And a large key hole. A keyhole indicated a key. The key probably held by someone responsible for the maintenance of the building.

  Great! Just great!

  I could ask Vernon, the youngest and friendliest of the porters, about the maintenance people and it wouldn’t be too difficult to make him divulge the information, but what then? What possible plausible reason could I give them for wanting the key? In frustration I pulled at the handle and with a terrifying screech, it opened. Not by very much because the vine was growing all over it, but it opened nevertheless. I practically flew downstairs, made sure that there was no one in the kitchen, opened a few units and realised that I didn’t have a clue where to find it. The machine oil. There was a distinct possibility that there wasn’t any in the house at all. Why would anyone need machine oil? The Boys were watching TV in their room, they must have found a channel in their own language because the sounds coming out of there were unfamiliar. Bakir had gone to his chess club quite early
and wasn’t due back for at least two hours. Feverishly, I looked around some more. On the shelf closest to the hob, among endless bottles of various oils and vinegars, there was also a large spray can. Spray oil. The kind advertised for slimmers and the health-conscious. I grabbed it quickly and dived into a drawer that contained all kind of culinary tools and devices. At the very bottom was a pair of kitchen scissors. It was meant to cut through anything thrown at it. I had no choice but to assume that it could cope with a mesh of leafy branches as well. My next thought was a stroke of genius. While searching for machine oil I’d discovered that in one of the drawers there was a large selection of accumulated tie-strips. The Boys were using them to tie the top of plastic boiling and roasting bags. I picked up a handful of the longest variety and made my way back to the terrace.

  I liberally sprayed the hinges and the lock with oil first to give them time to loosen up, then set about removing the overgrowth. The scissors didn’t quite live up to their reputation, but I was nevertheless making slow and steady progress. It would have been much faster if I simply hacked through the greenery, but that wouldn’t have been very wise. Instead, I made a cut in each branch that stood in the way, taking care to cut nothing off. It occurred to me at some point that I was probably on a hiding to nothing. There had to be another gate on the other side and that one was bound to be firmly locked. With my bare hands I swept the debris under the foliage, moved the branches out of the way and pulled the door.

  It opened smoothly and quietly to reveal the neighbour’s terrace in all its colourful grandeur.

  I carefully pulled the door behind me until it was only slightly ajar and crouched in the shade of the arched doorway and the profusely flowering bougainvillea.

  The patio door was wide open which meant that someone was at home. It was good ten minutes before I detected a movement behind the glass wall. Something light and floating. Feminine.

  I waited.