The Eunuch's Ward (The String Quartet) (26 page)
Read The Eunuch's Ward (The String Quartet) Online
Authors: Silver Smyth
‘Ah, I see. You were happy to do without his money, you were almost looking forward to it, but they couldn’t? They turned on him because he’d let them down? You do realise, don’t you, that after all they’ve done for you, you resent you parents more than you resent the murders, maiming and torture committed by that sadistic control freak. I know you’ve been through a lot recently, but what harm has actually come to you? Mungo and your parents shielded you with their lives, their bodies and their love all the way. Don’t they deserve some recognition and gratitude?’
He called them my
parents
, twice, as if that was the most natural thing in the world. I hated him for it. ‘They could have got away a long time ago,’ I repeated.
‘Maybe they could.’ Hugh was shouting now. I was sure that I would have heard him above the noise of the engine even without the headphones. ‘Maybe someone else could, someone less credulous or less impressionable. Yes, they may have developed a hostage syndrome. We’ll never know. But we do know that for years your father lived on the fringe of existence for your sake. And that you mother managed to smile and look radiant in her exorbitantly expensive frocks in spite of horrendous, repeatedly inflicted injuries inside her. For your bloody sake. If your heart can’t guide you, use your head, Sonata.’
We landed. The blades were still rotating at speed. I jumped out of the chopper and ran towards the house. Somewhere half way down the path I turned back.
‘I didn’t ask to be born! I didn’t ask to be born! I didn’t ask to be born!’
Chapter 23
There was one thing one could say for Hartsfield. It was well built and well maintained. Not a single wooden board creaked when I crept out of my bedroom at midnight. I had no idea if those sad journos ever abandoned their vigil at the gate, but they were the least of my problems. The same moon that swam in the English Channel a couple of hours ago loomed low over our drive too, sparing me the need to switch on the lights as the car quietly rolled down the drive. I clicked the fob at the last possible moment and the gate slid open. There was no one around. Some fifty yards further down the lane I switched on the lights and took first turn on the right towards Munro House.
Their gates would have been locked too at night. I parked the Evora by the low stretch of the wall, climbed over and followed the path to the back of the house. With luck, I might catch Rosie in the middle of midnight feast. My luck was out. Like the rest of the house, the kitchen was in darkness. I sat on the step and fished out my mobile.
‘I’m at your kitchen door. Can you let me in?’
Thirty seconds later a small light came on in a first floor bedroom.
Rosie’s pyjama bottoms were white with a pattern of bright red pursed lips scattered all over them. She gave me a silent hug. ‘Ice cream?’
I nodded.
‘Chocolate or strawberry?’
‘Strawberry, please.’
Rosie brought two plastic boxes out of the freezer and two soup spoons out of a drawer. She pushed the pinkish one in front of me and added a couple of misted glasses of filtered water. ‘Water is very good for grief.’
It took five large spoonfuls of ice cream and half a glass of water for the tears to start running down my face. At the first sign of my wet cheeks Rosie popped over to the sink and returned with a brand new kitchen roll. She tore off two sheets and pushed them into my hand. I first attended to the snot, two more sheets dried my face.
‘Want a brief summary?’
Rosie nodded.
‘It won’t be all that brief,’ I warned.
She shrugged.
‘The man I thought was my father, the one who called himself Leon Ganis, was actually British, as yet unidentified. He must have done something very bad in his youth because he went on the run and eventually ended up in Armenia. There he met the real Leon Ganis and his much younger brother, Bakir...’
‘Bakir, the eunuch?’ Rosie asked in whisper.
‘He wasn’t a eunuch then. That happened later. Bakir was just an urchin, an orphan. He, the unknown Brit, killed Leon Ganis in a fight, stole his money and all the family papers and went on the run again, taking the boy with him....’
‘Why?’
‘Why did he take Bakir along?’
She nodded.
‘I don’t know. As an interpreter, because having a child with him gave him a degree of respectability... who knows? He was good to the boy.’
‘Why don’t you give him a name?’
‘Like what? That’s the whole point, I don’t even know who he was.’
‘Gringo? That’s Spanish for a stranger, I think.’
‘No, no, that’s much too romantic. There are songs about gringos.’
Rosie looked up to the ceiling as if searching for inspiration there. ‘Ignotum? That’s Latin for an unknown person.’
‘Yes, that will do. Sounds fittingly ignominious.’
‘Will you be coming back to school? The term starts in three days time.’
I’d been thinking about that a lot. I liked school, but it wasn’t just that. I hated the thought that the bastard Ignotum might rob me of yet another key aspect of my life even after his death. ‘After a fashion. I don’t think that Eleanor String would welcome hordes of reporters around the gate all the time. I thought that I could maybe attend via Skype. I see all of you, you all see me. It would be like actually being there with you only minus Selena Buerk’s farts.’
We both laughed and that prompted another bout of sobbing.
‘Once they reached Turkey or maybe Greece, Ignotum, found work on ships, merchant ships that were bringing him and Bakir closer and closer to the UK. He used the time to eradicate all the indentifying marks including his fingerprints. Later, when he applied to the Immigration for asylum, he showed them the scars as evidence of torture back in Armenia. He and Bakir got their leave to remain in the UK and later their nationality papers as brothers. Leon and Bakir Ganis.’
‘Blimey!’
‘On his way up the greasy pole, he got involved with promotion of beauty contestants. That’s how they met my mother. She and Bakir, who was about twenty at the time, and a very attractive young man, fell in love. Mother got pregnant...’
‘With you?’
I nodded. ‘Worse luck. Why couldn’t she just had an abortion and be done with it?’
‘Nat!’
I ignored Rosie’s indignation. ‘The bastard Ignotum, who had never shown any interest in her before, which makes sense now that we all know that he was impotent and sadistically revengeful with it, organised an assault on Bakir. The control freak had Bakir mass raped and castrated. After that, under pretence of tender loving care, he had him pumped full of all the wrong hormones and stuff... Then he asked mother to marry him, and because Bakir was very ill and in a shock for a very long time, mother agreed. Once I was born, he started torturing her. Sexually... I won’t go into details. She had to grin and bear, literally, because he had us both under constant surveillance and threatened to do the same and worse to me. And, I do mean worse... You can’t even begin to imagine and I don’t want you to... Anyway, that was his trademark all along. Anyone who stood in his way was either killed or tortured by his gangs of sick desperados, most of whom he got rid of in much the same way so that no one could ever bear witness against him. Remember Mungo?’
Rosie nodded. She was deathly pale.
‘Shall I stop?’
‘No,’ she said shakily. ‘No, get it all out now and then we can... we can forget all about it together.’
‘Ignotum learned about the brief encounter between Mungo and me. A week later Mungo was ambushed by several of his thugs and raped. All of the assailants were HIV positive. Quite accidentally,’ I continued, careful to avoid the sight of Rosie’s reaction, ‘Mungo eventually learned who was responsible for the attack and its consequences. He set out to ruin Ganis Enterprises. Inadvertently, he also brought Hugh and me together in the process.’
Rosie squeezed my hand.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘yes. In the midst of death we are in life... Sorry. Didn’t mean to be facetious. He, Mungo, was more successful than he thought. Ignotum literally went off his rocker. If he’d been deranged before, and he had to be to commit such atrocities, the loss of his business pushed him totally over the edge. He got it into his head that if Mungo and I married, and he killed us both, all Mungo’s assets would come to him. Of course, he used the good old threat against me again to make us go along with it.’
‘Would he have inherited?’ Rosie raised her eyebrows. ‘Even if Ignotum wasn’t a suspect, I don’t think...’
‘You’re probably right, but it doesn’t matter any longer. Mungo was sick and tired of living anyhow. He willed his private property to Hugh and me by the way of an apology for what he’s put us through and forced the old bastard aboard the faulty jet.’
‘So, you’re not Mrs. Steen and you’re still Sonata Ganis?’
I nodded. ‘Yes, Sonata Ganis, the daughter of a eunuch.’ Totally exhausted, I returned to the comfort of the plastic tub of slowly melting ice cream.
Rosie followed suit. She replaced the lid on chocolate and dug her spoon into strawberry. For several minutes the only sound around was the ticking of the kitchen clock.
‘Want a bed?’
I shook my head. ‘No, thanks. There are three separate engines throbbing away inside me. They need to run out of fuel before I can get any sleep.’
‘And, they are?’
‘Remember the garden party and the garden shed?’
‘Yes,’ Rosie whispered.
Through my mist, I felt a little guilty for reminding her. For all the pretence, she’d never really got over it. ‘We both felt dirty, soiled and unworthy afterwards, didn’t we?’
She nodded.
‘That’s how I feel now. The smelly, slimy daughter of the gutter.’
‘And the second engine?’
‘I loved him.’
‘The Ignotum?’
‘No, not him. I loved Leon Ganis, my father, who worked hard, looked after me and gave me everything he could.’
‘Except freedom,’ Rosie added quickly. ‘The third engine?’
‘There isn’t one. Just those two. Strong enough to count for five or ten.’
We were nearing the bottom of the ice cream tub.
Rosie licked her spoon clean and walked behind my chair.
‘Are you expecting words of wisdom?’ she wound her arms around me.
‘No.’
‘Good. I don’t know any. Like you, I’m just a clueless teenager groping my way through. The one thing that we both know...’
‘What one thing?’
She kissed me on the temple. ‘The only thing you can do. Deal with it.’
* * *
At almost 5 am there were two cars parked by the gate. Seeing my headlights from afar, three people jumped out and quickly positioned themselves in front of the gate. I stopped and slid down the window by a fraction. Enough for them to hear me but, with the early morning light working against them, not enough to take any photos.
‘If you don’t move away, I’ll get a helicopter to lift me out of here within a few minutes. I’ll leave you to talk to my little Evora to your heart’s content. If you do as I say, I’ll send you out hot drinks and a decent breakfast.’
A few face-saving minutes later, they settled for creature comforts.
Presumably alerted by the car engine Bakir opened the front door.
‘Could you get the Boys to take a large, no effort spared breakfast to those poor souls by the gate, please?’
‘Why?’
‘Because it’s cold out there and they’re trying to earn a living.’
I ran upstairs two at a time.
Hugh was fast asleep, stretched out on his front, his face buried in pillows.
I quickly undressed down to my knickers, pulled on his pyjama top and slid into the bed. The sound of his breathing muted out almost instantly.
‘Have you come back?’ He made no move to bring me closer to him.
There was just the question mark hanging between us in the semi-darkness.
I turned to my side and nestled for a bit until my head settled in its usual place on his chest. ‘It won’t be all plain sailing. But, we’ll deal with it. Together.’
~
THE END
~
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