Free The Eunuch's Ward (The String Quartet) by Silver Smyth

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.