Jasmine Nights Read Online Free PDF Page B

weathervane was always turned towards him and the storms that would come.
    ‘I’m twenty-three years old.’ Saba and her mother faced each other, breathing heavily. ‘He can’t tell me what to do any more.’
    ‘Yes he can,’ her mother yelled. ‘He’s your flaming father.’
    She’d looked at her mother with contempt. ‘Do you ever have a single thought of your own, Mum?’ That was cruel: she knew the consequences of her mother sticking up for herself.
    Her mother’s head shot up as if she’d been struck.
    ‘You haven’t got a clue, have you?’ she said at last. ‘You’re a stupid, selfish girl.’
    ‘Clue about what, Mum?’ Some devil kept Saba going.
    ‘What it’s like for your father on the ships. It’s carnage in the shipping lanes – half the time they go around with their knees bent, expecting another bomb to drop on their heads.’
    That brought them both to the edge of tears.
    ‘I want to do something that makes sense to me – I don’t want to just work in the factory. I can do something more.’
    ‘Uggh,’ was all her mother said.
    That hurt too, and made it worse – her mother, her great supporter, talking as if she couldn’t stand her at a moment that should have been so fine. She ran down the dark corridor where photos of her father’s severe-looking Turkish ancestors gazed down on one side, and her mother’s glum lot from the Welsh valleys on the other. Slamming the door behind her, she ran into the back yard. She sat down in the outside privy, sobbing.
    She was nearly twenty-four years old and completely stuck. The year the war had started was the year in which she had had a whole wonderful life worked out – her first tour with The Simba Sisters around the south coast; singing lessons with a professional in Swansea; freedom, the chance to have the life she’d trained for and dreamed of for so long. Nothing to look forward to now except a factory job, or, if she was lucky, the odd amateur concert or radio recording.
    ‘Saba.’ A timid knock on the door. Tansu walked in wearing her floral pinny and her gumboots, even though it wasn’t raining. She had her watering can in her hand. ‘Saba,’ she gave a jagged sigh, ‘don’t go ma house.’ Don’t go ma house was Tansu-speak for ‘I love you, don’t leave me.’
    ‘I don’t understand, Tansu,’ she said. ‘You’ve come to the concerts. You’ve seen me. You’ve said I was born to do this. I thought we were all in this together.’
    Tansu pulled a dead leaf off the jasmine bush she’d planted in the back yard that had resolutely refused to thrive. ‘Too many people leave this house,’ she said. ‘Your sister has gone to the valley.’
    ‘She hasn’t gone,’ Saba protested. Lou, at eight the baby of the family, had been sent away to avoid the bombs to a nice family in the Rhondda Valley. She came home with her little suitcase on the bus most weekends.
    ‘Your father at sea.’
    ‘He wants to be there. It’s his life.’
    ‘You no ma pinish.’ Another way of saying don’t go.
    ‘Tansu, I’ve dreamed about this for the whole of my life. I’ll make money for us. I’ll buy you a big house near Üsküdar.’ The place Tan always mentioned when she talked about Turkey.
    ‘No.’ Tansu refused to meet her eye. She stood there, legs braced, eyes down, as old and unmovable as rock.
    Saba looked over her head, at the darkening sky, the seagulls flying towards the docks. ‘Please help me, Tan,’ she said. They’d sung together once. Tan had taught her baby songs.
    ‘I say nothing,’ said Tansu. ‘Talk to your father.’
    Her father, Remzi, was an engineer on the Fyffes’ ships that had once carried bananas and coal and rice all around the world. Dark-haired and with a permanent five o’clock shadow, he was handsome and energetic. As a child, he seemed to her a God-like figure who ruled the waves. The names of the ships he sailed on – Copacabana, Takoradi, Matadi – intoxicated her like poetry or a