Jasmine Nights by Julia Gregson Read Free Book Online

with it regularly. For her, it had only ever been a prop in a deliciously frightening childhood game they’d played together. Remzi, growling ferociously, would race around the back yard brandishing the thing, she squealing with delight as she got away.
    But today he put the martinet down on the bed, on top of her sheet music. He looked at her with no expression in his eyes whatsoever.
    ‘Daddy!’ she said. ‘No! Please don’t do this.’ As if she could save him from himself.
    ‘I cannot let you go on disobeying me,’ he said at last. ‘Not in front of your mother, your grandmother. You bring shame on our house.’
    ‘Shame on our house! Shame on our house!’ It was like someone in a panto. Someone with a Sinbad beard, a cutlass. But the time when she could have joked with him about that had gone. As she moved away from him, the ENSA letter fell on the floor. He swooped on it and held it in his hand.
    ‘You’re not going,’ he said. ‘Bad enough that your mother has to work in a factory now.’
    She looked at him and heard a kind of shrilling sound in her ears.
    ‘I am going, Daddy,’ she said. ‘Because I’ll never get another chance like this again.’
    His eyes went black; he shook his head.
    ‘No.’
    If he hadn’t torn up the letter then and there, everything might have stayed the same. But he tore it and scattered it like confetti over the lino, and then all hell let loose because that letter was living proof that something you wanted really badly to happen could happen.
    And to be fair, she hit him first: a glancing blow on the arm, and then he rushed at her, groaning like an animal, smacking her hard around the head and shoulders with his fists. For a few breathless moments they roared and grunted, then Tansu rushed in shrieking like a banshee and throwing her apron over her head and shrieking, ‘ Durun! Yapmayin! ’ Stop it, don’t!
    He left Saba sitting on the bed, trembling and bleeding from her nose. She felt horribly ashamed of both of them.
    Her father had always been a strict, even a terrifying parent – your father runs a dictatorship not a democracy, her mother had told her once with a certain pride – but never, at least to her, a violent man. She’d thought him too intelligent for that. But on this day, she felt as if she’d never known him, or perhaps only experienced him in bits and pieces, and that this bit of him was pure evil.
    ‘If you go,’ his voice went all shuddery with rage, ‘I never want to see your face again.’
    ‘I feel the same,’ she said quietly, ‘so that’s good.’
    She wanted to hit him again, to spit on him. It was only later she collapsed in a flood of tears, but before she did, she wrote her first letter to Dominic Benson, an act of defiance that changed everything.
Dear Pilot Officer Benson ,
I expect to be in London, at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, on 17 March for an audition at ENSA. Perhaps we could meet after that?
With best wishes ,
Saba Tarcan

Chapter 4
    Alone for the first time, and in London, when she swung her feet on to the cold lino and sat on the edge of her bed, her hands shook so much it was hard to do up her dress.
    She’d been awake for most of the night in the nasty little bed and breakfast in Bow Street that ENSA had recommended. On top of the bedside table scarred with old cigarette burns, there was a Gideon Bible and an empty water carafe with a dead fly in it. She’d lain with her eyes open under a slim green damp-smelling eiderdown, listening for bombs and trying not to think about home, and Mum.
    Her mother had taken an hour off work to walk her down to the railway station.
    ‘When will you be back, then?’ she’d asked, her face white as death under the green turban.
    ‘I don’t know, Mum – it depends. I may not get it.’
    ‘You’ll get it,’ her mother said grimly. ‘So what shall I tell Lou?’
    ‘Tell her what you like.’
    ‘It’ll break her heart if you go.’
    ‘Mum, be fair – you started this