The Eunuch's Ward (The String Quartet) Read Free Page A

up at once.’
    We were a group of about eight or nine, boys and girls, when we entered the shed, and there were five or so more hanging about the entrance.
    ‘What are they all looking so shifty about?’ Rosie said what I was thinking. ‘What do they know that we don’t? Lily, hey, Lily...’
    Lily was too busy to answer. She paired off two boys and two girls, linked herself arm in arm with a lanky, sun-speckled son of the village bank manager and whistling ‘ Here Comes the Bride ’ fairly accurately, she led the little procession indoors.
    ‘Bloody hell, Nat, they’re playing weddings,’ Rosie laughed. ‘I don’t believe it. She’s organised a mass wedding. C’mon, let’s go somewhere else.’
    Later, I wished hundreds of times that I turned back and walked away as Rosie had suggested. It wasn’t as if I didn’t suspect what was afoot. I remember the butterflies in my stomach, the mixed feeling of nausea and fascination that kept me where I was.
    ‘Just a minute, Rosie. I suspect that Lily the Hypo may have surpassed herself this time.’
    Once inside, Lily let go of her partner, pulled the other two girls to the tatty remains of a corner settee and the three of them sunk down onto the grubby leather, screeching and flailing their legs in the air.
    ‘Over here, lover boy,’ Lily ordered her chosen mate, whipping off her pants at the same time. ‘Make me come and you can keep them as a trophy.’ She hung the trophy, made of thin white cotton, with fraying elastic around the waist and a trace of skid-marks along the gusset, on the handle of the lawnmower closest to the settee.
    There were a few titters and gasps in the midst of stunned silence.
    I said, ‘She’s blooming barking,’ and rammed my elbow into the stomach behind me. There was a satisfying yelp of pain, and the hand that was trying to travel up my leg dropped off. The banker’s boy was fiddling with his zip, trying to free the tail of his chequered shirt from its teeth. I could feel the steamy heat of suspense around me. That was the other moment when I should have left and dragged Rosie away with me. But, I didn’t. Like everyone I stood there and watched with bated breath.
    Lily wasn’t known for her patience.
    ‘Give it here,’ she lifted herself from her seductive recline and reached for the problem area.
    There was a sound of ripping and Lily ended up with something long and flabby in her hand. It looked nothing like the large swollen examples of grown-up sexual desire that sometimes sneaked their way to our computer screens when the school firewall was down, or I saw pictured in the magazines that my father’s bodyguards usually left around.
    ‘Looks like an overcooked cannelloni,’ Rosie said aloud, ‘only smaller.’
    I admired how cool she was.
    Her remark must have woken up the boys’ competitive spirit for two of them immediately jumped on the other two girls that had been waiting for attention with their knees apart. The others were fumbling with their trousers, panting and sweating, their eyes darting around as if looking for guidance. One of the seductresses on the sofa uttered a muffled scream, pushed the boy off her and ran past me, two others quickly took her place, bringing their quarry with them.
    ‘Whoa!’ Lily cried jubilantly, ‘we’ve got a take-off!’
    All around me, the boys held their pale little witchetty grubs in trembling fingers, kneading them gingerly, filling the room with a sticky-sweet smell that made me heave. The boy right next to me was crying and trying to shake something snot-like off his fingers.
    I had enough. Only, I couldn’t move. I mean, I literally couldn’t move, there were too many frenzied critters packed around me. I looked at Rosie. She was staring ahead with unseeing eyes as if something had struck her on the head and only the support of the bodies around her kept her upright.
    I stuck my fingers into my mouth and whistled. ‘Miss Payton approaching at two o’clock’, I