The Eunuch's Ward (The String Quartet) (4 page)

‘What do I need more clothes for?’ I rudely refused Mother’s invitation to inflict a serious damage on my father’s credit card. ‘Where will I ever get to show them?’

Mother had finished her ten lap morning swim in record time. After a fortnight of rain and low temperatures, Indian summer descended on London in all its glory just when I was determined to be deeply miserable.

‘Boyfriend trouble?’ Mother asked.

‘And when and where would I have had a chance to find myself a boyfriend?’

She shrugged. ‘Girls usually manage. I wouldn’t have minded at all if you brought that nice looking Richardson boy to dinner.’

Nick Richardson had been one of the volunteers at the Staying Power project. One of the two rugby players. The six-pack and teeth man. Outside the team practice, he was dividing his time between the gym and his teeth hygienist who kept his teeth Hollywood white, he told us. His six pack and those chalky Hollywood teeth had earned him a starring role in a series of adverts for body-spray for men.

‘Daddy wouldn’t approve,’ I pulled a face at her. ‘He’d set Bakir on you.’

She winced, but said nothing.

That wasn’t her first unexpected reaction to the mention of Bakir.

‘What’s the story, Mother? You’re not having an affair with Bakir, are you?’ I waited but there was still no response. ‘This is where you laugh and tell me off for being cheeky, Mother.’

She smiled.

Not good enough.

‘You do know that people talk about us, that’s you and I, the Ganis women, as the
Ganis Harem
. Will you really leave me in Bakir’s care when school starts? It’s bad enough as it is. I’m not allowed to go anywhere on my own, I’m being driven around in bullet proof cars by a succession of inarticulate gay gorillas, I’m being told who I may or may not see. For heaven’s sake, even the royal princesses have more freedom than that. You may have signed up for all that, but I haven’t.’

‘Your father is a very rich man...’

‘Well, of he’s so rich he can afford the ransom. Personally, I wouldn’t mind being kidnapped, even killed. It would be damn sight more exciting than having no life at all.’

For a change, Mother seemed to have listened. ‘I’ll talk to your father about boarding at the String College again. He may change his mind. How’s that?’

‘An improvement on being a eunuch’s ward,’ I smiled broadly and she smiled back. We didn’t often get on this well. She was mostly far too remote, wrapped up in a world of her own. I also worried a little. I’ve seen that warm, brilliant smile of hers shine all over the world as a promise of better things to come, only to turn into a frown of pain on account of too high killer heels or a prospect of yet another authentic exotic lunch as soon as she was off stage. Could this have been just another stage? Was I yet another audience?

But, the problem named Bakir was real enough and much too close. Why would have a pretty and rich woman like my mother accepted his authority over hers?

‘Has Bakir hurt you?’ I asked, counting on the element of surprise. If I didn’t give her time to think what should or shouldn’t say, she might tell me the truth. ‘Has he hurt you in some way? If he has, that wasn’t your fault, you realise that, don’t you?’ The more I thought about it the more I believed that was a distinct possibility. My father always talked about Bakir as his oldest and most trusted ally. The monster could have used the position of trust to indulge his... At the age of fifteen I wasn’t sure what a eunuch might have chosen to indulge in, but if my mother was at the other end of it, I didn’t like it.

‘Don’t be silly,’ she looked at me in amazement. ‘Bakir wouldn’t hurt anyone.’ For a few moments she seemed lost in one of her reveries. ‘He wasn’t always like he’s now. He used to be quite good looking.’

‘But, wasn’t he castrated by the monks when he was a child?’

‘You’ve been reading one of those gossip magazines again,’ she wagged her finger at me. ‘No, years ago, when he and your father first came here, he was a strapping twenty-year old with great singing voice and gentle manners. He couldn’t speak much English, but that didn’t matter. We were great friends back in those days, your father, Bakir and I.’

I was totally enthralled. ‘Good grief, Mother. That’s entirely different from the official line. What’s my Daddy going to say?’ I teased. ‘And anyway, what happened to Bakir? When? Why?’

‘Don’t know why. Or who. I do know when, though. We had just returned from the Miss World contest in...’

‘Stop right there,’ I ordered.

‘All right, all right. I’ll shut up.’ Meekly, as usual, she picked up a magazine and lifted her super-dark shades to the top of her head. ‘I need a pair that lets me actually see through them.’

‘No, Mum, no. I want to hear. I just want you to start from the beginning. I only know the official version...’

She seemed pleased. The magazine dropped to the floor. ‘There is no official story, Nat. There’s only one story that gets rehashed by the interviewer and the editor depending what point they want to make. It started when I won the Miss Beach title. My prize was fifty pounds and free stay in the holiday camp for a week, the chalet and all meals included. All I had to do was smile and wear skimpy clothes all week. Leon had a finger in every pie, and Bakir who was a handsome, tall lad of twenty odd, was his general factotum. Leon first approached me asking if I would be willing to stay on in Weston-Super-Mare for another week and advertise a small hotel of his and a line of beach clothing that he part owned. I agreed, of course. It went from there. He funded me for the national contest and then for the Miss World. For a fee, you know. It was a win-win business arrangement...’

‘But, were you in love?’

‘Yes, of course. I was your age, I couldn’t help being in love. Anyway, my job was to look after my looks,’ as she giggled the seventeen-year old peeped out of her eyes for a moment, ‘Bakir was looking after me, and Leon was getting richer and richer at an amazing rate...’

‘Legally?’ I couldn’t help wondering.

‘I didn’t ask,’ she admitted cheerfully. ‘He never seemed to have any problems with authorities and just as he’s doing now, he always sought publicity, so I imagine that it must have been largely legal. Whether it was always moral and ethical, you’d better ask him about that.’ She giggled again. ‘Or, maybe not. He’s a bit short-fused these days.’

I laughed back.

‘As you know, I came third at the world competition, and that brought in a lot of sponsorship offers and a lot of money. All the three of us were riding on the crest of the wave. Back in London we decided to have a small celebration of our own, they way we used to when the rewards were a lot more modest. I lived in Hammersmith and Bakir went to our favourite little takeaway to pick up the food that we’d ordered over the phone.’ She licked her lips. ‘If you ask Bakir or the Boys, they’ll bring you bastoruma, manti and dolma, from Edgware Road. You’ve got to finish it all off with anoushhabour...’

‘Anoush a what?’

She patted me on the head. ‘You haven’t lived, child. Wait until you’ve tried it. He left at close to seven, we waited patiently for an hour, thinking he might have run into someone or that something had gone wrong with the order. Eventually, Leon phoned the shop and they told him that Bakir had taken the order away hours ago. I phoned the police and they said what they always say...’

‘That Bakir was a grownup and that they couldn’t do anything before he was missing for 24 hours,’ I finished her sentence. I was an avid fan of police dramas.

‘Exactly. In the end, Leon went to look for him. He told me that he could be a while, certainly hours, maybe days, but that he was going to find his friend one way or another. It was almost two days before he turned up again. He’d traced Bakir to some condemned housing in north London. A family of illegal immigrants found him on an informal rubbish tip near to where they lived. They took him in and looked after him but didn’t dare call the police or the doctor. To spare them, the immigrant family, I mean, Leon didn’t call anyone either. There was a small private clinic that he knew and he took Bakir there. He had been kicked all over with hobnailed boots, raped who knows how many times and then castrated.’

Mother practically threw out the last words and fell silent. Tears were silently running down her face, dripping freely off her chin.

I took her hand into mine and left her to it for a few minutes.

Eventually, she bent over, kissed the top of my head and dipped into the pool again.

She didn’t finish the story until the Boys cleared the table after dinner and we moved back to the sun loungers on the terrace. London hummed companionably below us.

‘Leon had invested a great deal of money into the treatment but nothing worked...’

Questions had been milling and piling up in my head all afternoon. ‘But, these days, with all the transsexual ops, surely he could have had a new... you know...’’ I took a deep breath, ‘a reconstructed penis, or something...’

Mother shook her head. ‘The procedure exists, yes, but it’s not very effective. It could have dangerous side effects, too. I’m sure you wouldn’t want the gory details even if I were able to supply them, but that wasn’t the main problem anyhow. Bakir was intolerant to hormone treatments. If anything, they were counterproductive...’

Her voice was getting quieter and quieter.

‘It’s okay, Mum. Don’t upset yourself. If I ever decide to look into the subject, there’s always the internet. Bakir couldn’t help with tracking down the culprits, I take it?

‘He was attacked from behind,’ she chuckled bitterly, ‘in more ways than one. There were five or six of them, all dressed in dark clothing, all masked, all deadly silent. Mercifully, he lost consciousness pretty soon.’

‘And they all used condoms?’

She nodded.

In the silence my mind turned into a deranged abacus.

‘It must have been at about that time that you and Dad got married?’ I ventured.

‘We did.’ I’d never heard her laugh that often before. ‘I had a little bun in the oven. By rights, and perfectly deservedly, you won a beauty contest too. Shocked?’

‘Don’t be silly.’ I was shocked that she’d expected me to be shocked.

‘You’re such an intelligent, sensible child, Nat. I’m very proud of you.’

* * *

It took me a long time to get to sleep and when I did I had terrible dreams.

I was running through rooms of curtains and mirrors, running from familiar but sinister shadows, terrified of mirrored faces too skewed for recognition, too familiar to ignore. And in each room, behind each curtain, there was Bakir, laughing at me, pointing at me with a finger adorned with a long, brightly painted fingernail.

It was ironic to the point of cruelty that the only time when my mother and I had a serious, worthwhile conversation it had to be about something so repulsive. Worse still, if she wanted me to see Bakir in a kinder light, she failed. I couldn’t help feeling that his ordeal was punishment for some atrocity that he’d committed in the past. I wasn’t quite heartless enough to accept the horrendous act as just deserts, but I couldn’t find as much pity in my heart as Mother wanted to inspire.

I must repeat here – I was only fifteen. A very young, sheltered, rebellious and self-centred fifteen, I must add. Only too quickly, my thoughts reverted to the start of our conversation, to her off-the-cuff remark about the rugby player. She couldn’t have done worse if she tried. Reminding me of the Project was a big mistake. Mungo Steen should have been back from Wales a couple of weeks ago, but he hadn’t got in touch by any means available. I checked his Facebook page. His last entry was dated the day before the Project started. That was it for a while. When I looked again five days ago he’d changed his status to
Taking an indefinite break for personal reasons
.

I immediately felt guilty.

As he’d said, it would be him, not me, who’d take the blame for inappropriate behaviour.

If I hadn’t...

If I hadn’t what exactly?

Nothing happened in those few seconds. Nothing at all.

Except that I knew that it could have done. That we both wanted it to happen.

Panic wasn’t helping. I tried logical thinking.

Whatever the ‘personal reasons’ may have been, they couldn’t have possibly had anything to do with me and my little mischief. How would anyone know? I didn’t tell anyone, and he certainly wouldn’t have done. Besides, even if someone had witnessed that brief encounter, no one could have possibly arrested him for messing about with a minor without telling me and my parents about it.

That calmed me down a little.

If there were any consequences I would have been the first to know.

I started breathing again until cynicism set in.

I would have been the first to know unless, of course, there had been other minors. Other precocious, sex-obsessed virgins like me. After all, he was quick enough to point out the danger of being seen. Quick enough to run away when Dazza approached. That suggested previous experience.

On the other hand, if I was being honest, he hadn’t been encouraging me. Or grooming me. He hadn’t done anything at all.

Being aroused is not a crime...

And so I went round and round in endless circles.

There were no access restrictions on Mungo’s FB page, and I was checking it regularly just in case that someone said something illuminating. No one did. Just
good wishes, pink lights, let us know how you’re doing when you can, missing you already mate
type of messages. I went through the list of his 513 friends with a fine-tooth comb and learned absolutely nothing from it. His page mostly consisted of publishing-related articles and news, pages shared from the British Museum and the British Library websites, and an irregular blog mostly dealing with environmental controversy surrounding printed books. I’d left him an invitation to become friends weeks ago. It was never answered.

That gave me an idea. No, two ideas, the second one following closely on the heels of the first. Using my alternative FB persona, I posted a question ‘C’mon, everyone, spill! What’s the story here? What’s he up to? What have I missed?’