Vicious Circle (30 page)

The first time that Carl ejaculated into her mouth Sacha was taken fully aback. She was disgusted by the taste of it and she cried and told him she was not going to play any more. He kissed her and said that if she didn’t love him it was all right, but he still loved her. However, he didn’t act as if he still loved her. For weeks thereafter he was very distant and he said spiteful and hateful things to her. In the end she was the one who suggested they should have a swim together after lunch. Soon enough she became accustomed to the taste. But then sometimes he pushed it too far down her throat and she cried herself to sleep at night. The only thing that mattered was that her brother loved her again.

Then one afternoon he made her take off her panties. He sat on the bench in front of her and he touched her down there. She closed her eyes and tried not to wince and pull away when he put his finger inside her. In the end he stood up and squirted onto her tummy. Afterwards he told her she was disgusting and she must wipe herself clean and not tell anyone. Then he left her without another word.

She refused her dinner that evening and her mother gave her two tablespoons of castor oil and kept her back from school the next day.

Three weeks before her ninth birthday party Carl came to Sacha’s bedroom when the house was quiet. He took off his pyjamas pants and climbed into bed with her. When he pushed his thing inside her it was so painful that she screamed, but nobody heard her.

After he had gone back to his own room she found that she was bleeding. She sat on the toilet and listened to her blood dripping into the pan. She was too ashamed of herself to call her mother. In any event she knew that her mother was locked in her bedroom and would never answer her knocking or pleading.

After a while the bleeding stopped and she wadded her nightdress up between her legs. She hobbled down to the end of the passage and found a clean sheet in the linen cupboard to replace the bloody one. Then she crept down to the deserted kitchen and stuffed her soiled pyjamas and the bloody sheet into a garbage bag and put it into the dustbin.

The next day in school she knew everybody was staring at her. She was usually one of the stars of the mathematics class but now she could not work out the answers to any of the questions. Her teacher called her after the class ended and berated her for her poor attempt.

‘What is wrong with you, Sacha?’ She threw the paper down on the desk in front of her. ‘This isn’t like you at all.’

Sacha could not reply. She went home and stole a razor blade from her father’s bathroom. Then she went to her own bathroom and slit both her wrists. One of the housemaids saw the blood coming from under the door and she ran screaming to the kitchen.

The servants broke open the door and found her. They called an ambulance. The cuts she had inflicted on her wrists were not deep enough to be life threatening.

Marlene kept her out of school for three weeks. When she returned Sacha told her music teacher that she was not going to play the piano ever again. She refused to attend the musical evening that was scheduled for the following Friday. A few days later she hacked off all her hair with a pair of scissors and clawed her face until it bled, convinced she was breaking out in acne pustules. Her features grew haggard and her manner furtive and nervous. Her eyes were haunted. She was no longer beautiful. Carl told her she was ugly and he didn’t want to play with her any more.

A month later she ran away from home. The police picked her up eight days later in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and took her home. A few months later she ran away again. This time she made it as far as California before the police caught up with her.

When she was sent back to school she set fire to the music rooms. The fire destroyed the entire music wing, with damage amounting to several millions of dollars.

After a prolonged and thorough medical examination Sacha was sent to the Nine Elms Psychiatric Hospital in Pasadena, where she began a long and difficult treatment and rehabilitation programme. Never once did anyone suspect that she had suffered abuse of any kind. It seemed that Sacha herself had completely expunged the memory of it from her mind.

She put on weight rapidly. Within six months her body was grossly swollen and she was clinically obese. She kept her hair clipped close to the skull. Her eyes grew dull and moronic and she chewed her nails so deeply into the quick that her fingertips were stubby and deformed. She sucked her thumb almost continually. She became increasingly nervous and extremely aggressive. She attacked the nursing staff and other patients at the least provocation. In particular she was intensely antagonistic towards any of the staff who attempted to question her about her relationship with her family. She suffered from insomnia and began walking in her sleep.

When the family were allowed to visit her for the first time Sacha was sullen and withdrawn. She replied to questions from her parents with animal-like grunts and mumbled monosyllables. She did not recognize her once-beloved brother.

‘Aren’t you going to say hello to Carl Peter, darling?’ her mother chided her gently. Sacha averted her eyes.

‘But he is your own brother, darling Sacha,’ Marlene insisted. Sacha showed a small spark of animation.

‘I don’t have a brother,’ she said, using full sentences for the first time but still without raising her eyes from the floor. ‘I don’t want a brother.’

Henry Bannock stood up at this, and he said to his wife, ‘I think that Carl and I are doing more harm than good by being here. We will wait for you in the car park.’ He jerked his head at Carl. ‘Come on, my boy. Let’s get out of here.’

Henry abhorred being presented with misery and suffering in any form, particularly if it was related to him personally. He simply closed his mind to it, disassociated himself from it and walked away. Neither he nor Carl Peter ever returned to Nine Elms.

On the other hand, Marlene never missed a visit to her daughter. Every Sunday morning the chauffeur drove her a hundred miles to Pasadena and she spent the rest of the day chattering to her silent and withdrawn child. On one visit she took along a cassette of Rachmaninov’s piano concertos to play to Sacha on her portable tape recorder, hoping that it might reawaken Sacha’s musical talents.

As the first bars of the opening movement of the third concerto in D minor sounded, Sacha sprang to her feet, seized the machine and hurled it against the wall with maniacal strength. The recorder shattered. Sacha threw herself to the floor, drew her knees to her chest in the foetal position, thrust her thumb into her mouth and bumped her head rhythmically on the floor. It was the last time that Marlene attempted to intervene in her treatment.

From then onwards she confined herself to reading poetry to Sacha or reciting a detailed account of the past week’s trivial events. Sacha remained silent and totally withdrawn. She stared at the wall, swaying backwards and forwards in the chair as though it was a rocking horse.

Months later, Marlene Imelda discovered she was pregnant once again. She waited until the sex of the foetus was confirmed by her gynaecologist; then on her next visit to Nine Elms she confided in Sacha, ‘Sacha, darling, I have the most wonderful news. I am pregnant and you are going to have a baby sister.’

Sacha turned her head towards her and looked Marlene in the face for the first time during the visit.

‘A sister? My own sister? Not a brother?’ she asked in a clear and lucid voice.

‘Yes, darling. Your very own little sister. Isn’t it exciting?’

‘Yes! I want a sister very much. But I don’t want a brother.’

‘What do you think we should call her? What name do you really, really like?’

‘Bryoni Lee! I love that name.’

‘Do you know anybody with the same name?’

‘There was a girl at school who was my best friend.’ She smiled. ‘But her father found a new job and they moved to Chicago.’ She was animated and talking like a normal child of her age.

Week after week they discussed the new baby, and week after week Sacha asked the same questions in the same order. She laughed at her mother’s replies.

After Marlene’s eighth month of gestation Sacha sat next to her throughout the entire visiting period and Marlene held her daughter’s hand against her stomach. When the baby moved under her hand for the first time Sacha shrieked with excitement so loudly that the duty sister rushed into the visitors’ room.

‘What on earth is the matter, Sacha?’ she demanded.

‘It’s my little sister! Come and feel her.’

Marlene brought Bryoni Lee to visit Sacha for the first time when she was three months old. Sacha was allowed to hold her new sister and she sat with her on her lap for the entire visit, cooing and laughing at her and asking her mother questions about her.

After that first visit with Bryoni, Marlene never missed a week and Sacha was able to watch Bryoni Lee growing up. Her therapists recognized the beneficial effect that the infant was exerting on Sacha and they actively encouraged the relationship.

And so the years passed.

*

Bryoni Lee grew into another beautiful child. She was petite and dainty with pixie features and striking dark eyes. Her heart-shaped face was mobile and expressive. People were naturally attracted to her and they smiled whenever she entered the room. She had an enchanting singing voice. Her feet seemed to have been designed to dance. Yet she was strong willed and assertive.

Bryoni Lee’s natural place was at the head of the pack. Like her father Henry Bannock she was a born leader and organizer. In any group of children she effortlessly assumed control and even the elder boys bent readily to her will.

It took Henry some time to become accustomed to having a child in his household who he was unable to dominate entirely, especially in as much as this was a female offspring who was willing to stand up to him. Henry had strong views on the divides between the genders and the roles of and relationships of parents to children and men to women. Equality did not figure on his list.

Bryoni Lee delighted him in that she was clever and good to look upon, but she alarmed him in that she answered back and argued with him. Henry would fly into rages at her. He shouted at her and threatened her with corporal punishment. Once he actually carried out the threat. He pulled his belt out of its trouser loops and whacked her across the back of her bare legs. It raised a red weal but she stood her ground and refused to cry.

‘Daddy, you shouldn’t do that,’ she told him solemnly. ‘You were the one who told me that a gentleman never hits a lady.’

Henry had shot the Commie jets out of the sky over Korea and beaten the living daylights out of any number of the big tough roughnecks and roustabouts who worked his oil rigs, but now he backed down from an eight-year-old girl.

‘I’m sorry,’ he told her as he threaded the belt back through his trouser loops. ‘You’re right. I shouldn’t have done that. I won’t do it again. I promise you. But you must learn to listen to me, Bryoni Lee!’

In turn he began to listen to what she had to say, a courtesy that he had seldom extended to any other female. He discovered to his surprise that more often than not Bryoni Lee made good sense.

*

The year Bryoni Lee turned ten years of age was a memorable one in the Bannock household. In May Henry brought in his first off-shore deep water oil well. The market capitalization of Bannock Oil reached ten billion US dollars. And he purchased his personal Gulfstream V private jet, which he generally flew himself.

In the same month the Bannock family moved into their new home in Forest Drive. Designed by Andrew Moorcroft, of Moorcroft and Haye Architects, it was set in fifteen acres of gardens and contained eight bedroom suites. It won the Best House of the Year Award from the American Institute of Architects.

Carl Peter Bannock had graduated cum laude from Princeton and in June he went to work for Bannock Oil at its head office in Houston.

In July Henry Bannock asked his old friend and lawyer Ronnie Bunter to set up the Henry Bannock Family Trust to protect his close family from all harm and evil for the duration of all their lifetimes. The two of them laboured and agonized over the wording and the provisions of the trust deed until August when Henry finally signed it.

Ronald Bunter kept the original deed in his firm’s strongroom and Henry placed the only copy in his own strongroom at Forest Drive.

In August of that same year the doctors at Nine Elms told Henry and Marlene that Sacha Jean would never be able to live outside an institution and would be in care for the rest of her life. Henry made no comment and Marlene locked herself in her sumptuous new bedroom suite with a bottle of Bombay Sapphire gin.

In September Marlene Imelda Bannock began a spell of three months in the Houston drug clinic on a rehabilitation programme for alcoholics.

In October Henry Bannock divorced Marlene Imelda Bannock and was given full custody of both their daughters; Sacha and Bryoni. Carl was already an adult so his name never figured in the divorce documents. When she was released from the drug programme Marlene went to live alone in the Cayman Islands in a magnificent beachside property where she was tended by a large domestic staff. All this was a part of the divorce settlement.

In late October the Directorate of Civil Aviation refused to renew Henry Bannock’s commercial pilot’s licence. He had failed his medical check.

‘What the hell are you talking about?’ Henry demanded furiously of the physician who was conducting the examination. ‘I have just bought myself a Gulfstream for twelve million dollars. You cannot pull my licence now. I am as fit as I was when I was flying Sabre Jets in Korea.’

‘If I may respectfully remind you, Mr Bannock, that was some two decades ago. Since then you have worked yourself as if you were a one-man prison chain-gang. When did you last take a vacation?’

‘What the hell has that got to do with it? I haven’t got time for vacations.’

‘That’s my point exactly, sir. Then tell me how many Havana cigars you have smoked since Korea? How many bottles of Jack Daniel’s have you demolished? How much exercise do you take?’