Chapter 1
It was a hot blazing day as only happens in hot countries and many had thought that I would have died too with the others. The other people who were in the garden dead and buried their childish faces and voices cut short. All of them heckled before they could properly speak.
Something unkind had happened and nobody thought of us as people anymore. I wondered why and let it pass.
Then there was a buzz and a twit. A little Robin escalated into my vision. I asked the robin to be quiet as we had a silent funeral. Another child had died and we were not very happy. I was so miserable it made me sick.
Cousins or aunties who knows but they were near relations. I thought they were mere shadows a memory even then. I eventually shook with rage. I was going to find out why they died.
I was known as a monster a monster was a big fiend was she not?
They were nice they did not deserve to die at two and a bit. I cried.
One of the childish voices had been stopped and the robin now had replaced the damn thought and would not leave me.
The robin kept on at the sing-song. I crept into the corner and cried. The robin was sad too. He kept singing and did he leave it alone? He went from branch to branch as if his designs were to become visible.
Clean the bush he seemed to be singing. "Clean it up so I can continue in here and there."
"Robins do not speak," I exclaimed in triumph.
I did not want to go into that as if the whole essence of me reacted to the knowledge. How soon can I stop and play? I asked myself if I would never again play. I entered that door there was no turning back.
The door had closed and grandma-auntie Gold said I was a disaster waiting to happen.
Don’t look back if you care to be entertained.
But I have.
Don’t think about it if you want to live.
But I did and have never been happy.
I let everything alive half done and in the lurch and went towards justice for the little eight children. Why?
“Because they were the condemned children who are now dead cut when they were two and a half no longer living.”
“Why them?”
“Because they had to die,” had said the sad Gold who was married at a tender age to someone who raped her she insisted.
She had to do it, " let them go,"
The thing was I had no idea who had killed my little beastly cousins. The eight of them died with the puncture wounds on their necks. Then found out flashed after all the years of wanting to know the unspoken the spoken came to me.
"They smiled and smiled and smiled they would have increased us the man and I. " Gold said strangely.
After years of thought and pondering I pounced on the reasons. I had no knowledge of forensics as the glib television has. I always thought that the television would provide the answers.
Pure madness maybe but the television can be a great resource. I am thoughtful as I wonder as if the whole point is, that I am neglectful of duty. If I smile. So I snarl. I am going at a snail's pace. Of course, that is what an investigator does.
One step forward and many steps back.
Why did a nurse visit Gold all the time? Daily to inject me she would say. They formed a tight bond and soon Gold was parting with cash and property.
The image of a contented nurse comes to my vision.
She had motive and access.
“Do not clobber us with someone we do not know.”
“But you do know her.”
“Who was she?”
I spoke to an expert who pointed to one nurse. I did not even think she may have been responsible but the stuff of dramas are made of that.
In a mystery story, I found parallels to my own story.
The thing was he was an expert, he had to know about venom and snake venom at that because of autopsies. The snake's venom in a puncture injected by a needle a doctor said and did not know who had done it. I did not know either.
The garden was littered with snakes. Some of the smallish ones are poisonous. Not the great big one he only swallowed his food.
And did not begrudge his opinion on the matter. I am not at liberty to speak about his job or the foolish thing. And my helplessness all the years. My lack of training and the only thing that is holding me from tears is the know-how that the eight children need to get justice.
“ Eight childish laughter were stopped because a nurse killed them.”
She married their Dad.
Happy anniversaries to us all.
She did not want to look after the children she had no time. She loved her job as a nurse.
Then she walked off with the inheritance the money in the bank and all that.
“Take my Ma and Pa as well,” Said Gold.
The nurse had to.
The Mehmed’s were unhappy because he missed his children and he disliked the other two they reminded him of why he left the Greeks.
The unhappiness spiraled into madness.
She continued injecting the sick and made a lot of sick people well.
“What other reason did she have to kill the children?”
“Gold they were made of gold and ethnic cleansing,”
“They owned property and were going to fare well because their pa would have educated them. So the children were killed like rabbits because they were not Greek.”
“Far-fetched?”
“She had the motive for the syringe and she also drove everyone mad with her injections what other proof do you all want?”
In the forties, there was a lot of ethnic cleansing and motives were the Greeks and the Turks were in different languages and different religions. They got on each other's nerves.
Then the wars happened in the late 1950s and after that, they got on well like houses on fire.
The quiet revolutionary manner of the terrors were spats in households as everyone suddenly could not live together.
Parents were thrown out like rubbish and then other stuff happened. They were disused as bins the disabled were chained up so they could not escape.
“The only humane way to treat disability,”
“No, it is not.”
“People with no education have not much else to do but chain the disabled and go along with the ethnic cleansing for money because it is a hard fact of life when the groceries are hundreds for a family.
“And the kitty says 11 pounds there is no choice.”
Money is a hard motive to consider It makes for badness that nobody needs to know about. Sent the father mad and the wife to another man’s arms and the great expectations left the home and the hearth became a den of sin.
The nurse in question who had no name was only known as the nurse who smiled all the time. She married the father and then she got the in-laws' money. They moved in together and then they went back to Gold Tail between their legs.
"She threw us out," said the old people.
"You see I knew she would," Gold said proving her point. This made her so happy proving her point that she asked them gently to come in offered the offensive coffee and made their time as agreeable as possible.
They never got their money or anything back the nurse had a good solicitor.
They all moved into the big house with all the chattels and deeds. A one-room seemed to burst at the seams.
She did not expect the old people to live that long but they lived between them for 9 years.
