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

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