The old man heaves up his trousers with his thumbs. ‘Koleni!’ he shouts over his shoulder, before turning back to Lucas. Rachel catches his eye, though she doesn’t mean to, and at that precise moment she realises her arms are unencumbered – she has left her son on the bed downstairs instead of in his cot and she cannot recall if she closed the door behind her. Her chest constricts, she imagines him falling, down through the parquet and the concrete and the joists, down like the nappies in the rubbish chute, crumpling and flopping and broken.
She utters a soft cry, turns and clatters down the stairs.
* * *
The boy, Stepan, sees two faces like pale moons in the darkness of the landing. The man is angry, affronted. The woman flees, but first she looks. He spins on his toe and pushes off from the wall with his hand. The rollerblades squeak on the parquet as he glides back to the bedroom. That woman, he decides, is being beaten by the man. Some days he hears her crying and, once, a muffled scream.
Mykola will want to know. Mykola wants to know everything.
Chapter 6
Restoran Amadeus doesn’t have a sign – not one that Rachel can see. She steps back across the pavement of the little side street that runs northwest from Khreschatyk and stares up at the stone facade. It looks like all the other downtown apartment buildings in the darkness: everything a little larger than it needs to be with its chunky corner blocks, chiselled grooves and deep, frowning doorways. Like the sets from Batman, she thinks: the mocked-up Gotham of a Saturday night TV show, except this stone is solid, and cold.
‘The new restaurants like a bit of mystery. Gives them an air of exclusivity,’ says Lucas, flicking away his cigarette and pointing down some narrow steps. Rachel leans forward and sees a blue neon treble clef glowing above what must be the entrance. She wants to get Ivan into the warmth. Her husband grasps the front of the pushchair while she grips the handles. The temperature has dropped to minus two or three and a feathering of hoar frost makes the steps dangerously slippery. She is concentrating so hard on conveying her son to safety that she doesn’t see the figure loitering at the bottom until Lucas backs into him.
A short burst of Russian ensues, with some protest from Lucas, who can’t set the pushchair down while the man, hands in the pockets of his bulging leather jacket, bars the way.
‘For crying out loud. He says we can’t take the buggy inside!’
Rachel hauls the pushchair back up the steps. She has already half-imagined a scene of some kind. When she was changing her clothes in the bedroom, tugging her pre-pregnancy silk shell top over her head, adding her blue lambswool cardigan with its slight pilling under her breasts and digging out a pair of dangly earrings that she hadn’t worn since the night she left her job with the travel publisher, it was easy to believe she would never pass muster. Anyway, she knows Ukrainians don’t like mothers. She’s witnessed it herself dozens of times – the stares, the refusal to make way, the casual acceleration of approaching cars when she crosses the road with her son. The men are as bad as the old women. It’s no wonder the population is in freefall.
‘He says the baby is okay, but not the buggy,’ translates Lucas, clouds of breath rising from the stairwell as he huffs his exasperation. ‘How does he think that’s going to work? Fucking ridiculous.’
‘I’m not leaving it outside,’ says Rachel.
‘Absolutely not,’ says a low, lilting voice. Rachel turns to see Suzie looking down into the darkness. ‘It’s all right,’ continues Suzie. ‘Rob will sort it.’
As she speaks, a stocky, square-headed man in a black padded jacket moves past her. At the bottom of the steps he murmurs quietly to the doorman. Nothing concrete is exchanged. Just words. Then they are all waved inside as though the problem has never existed.
‘Nicely done,’ says Lucas, as the four of them introduce themselves in the narrow foyer. The men shake hands. ‘You’ve been here before?’
Rob smiles as he helps Rachel and Suzie off with their coats. He has disconcertingly round blue eyes, freshly barbered hair and thick, short arms. ‘BBC, eh?’ he says, so that Lucas and Rachel both know this is his night and he is in charge of everything that may or may not unfold.
Ten minutes later, the four of them plus Vee, who has persuaded Lucas to invite her, are seated at a central table next to a brick pillar. Rachel had asked Rob if she could tuck Ivan and his pushchair somewhere unobtrusive, but Ivan was having none of it and started crying, so now he is propped up in her lap.
‘Where’s Teddy tonight?’ Lucas asks.
‘Oh, Teddy,’ says Vee, with her faux-mournful, teasing voice. ‘Doing his thing, night-stalking, looking for sleaze . . .’
Rob laughs. ‘I hope he can afford it.’
‘You should see him!’ exclaims Vee. ‘He never pays.’
The restaurant is stuffy, overheated, and the tablecloths are an unappealing shade of brown. A couple of brash abstract canvases adorn the walls. Electric light is supplied by several opaque glass pendants that hang at different heights from the ceiling, making the room feel both too bright and oddly dull. A dark-suited man sits in the corner opposite them and near the door a couple of heavily made-up young women are sipping cokes.
Rob quickly arranges for the lights to be switched off and some candles lit instead. Three half-bottles of Stolichnaya are delivered to the table by a silent young waitress in a tight black dress, along with some imported beer and plates of cured salo and sliced pickle. Rachel sits facing the pillar, Lucas on one side, Vee on the other. Suzie, opposite, rests her hands on the table and smiles. Rob is on her right. Her cheekbones glimmer with powder and her hair is scooped up into a soft pile. She looks beautiful in the low light, thinks Rachel. She can’t see Suzie’s elastic band; her wrists are covered by her creamy angora sweater. She keeps glancing around, first at Rob, then back to Lucas and again across to Rachel. Suzie seems happy to have them all here together.
‘Right,’ says Rob, leaning across and pouring the chilled, oily vodka into five glasses. He is wearing a navy polo shirt with the collar raised up at the back. ‘There’s no menu, but the mushrooms are excellent and they slow cook the pork.’
‘Hey, and welcome to the cuteist baby in town!’ says Vee, laughing each time Ivan clutches at Rachel’s wrist and smiles with his mouth open, his soft chin shiny with drool. ‘This little guy’s got to get out more often!’
As the young waitress brings iron pans of mushrooms in garlicky melted cheese and the others talk about what it is like to work in this city with its excise restrictions and corruption and the petty vendettas in parliament and the catastrophic inflation that is screwing the population to the floor, Rachel sips her vodka and feels the liquid burn her throat. While Vee entertains Ivan, she wonders at how all this might actually be real – restaurants, meeting people, talking and eating and drinking. Why shouldn’t it be real? She smiles across at Suzie and nods and composes her face as if she belongs here, at least for a while.
Lucas and Vee are describing their latest visit to Chernobyl.
‘It’s a kind of hyper-reality,’ says Lucas, stabbing at a mushroom. ‘Pripyat more so than the reactor itself. I’m not saying it’s surreal, because we’re all tired of that cliché, but it’s weird to walk through those buildings and look out over the old playgrounds, the schools with everything either shattered or looted. Silence and stillness aren’t great for radio, mind you. I recorded some footsteps walking through one old gastronom, through snow, then broken glass, then stopping and talking so you get this great echo in the old Hall of Sport and Culture.’
‘What about safety?’ asks Suzie in her soft Edinburgh voice. ‘Was it safe?’
Lucas shrugs. ‘We had all the gear on. Overalls and slip-on shoes and disposable caps. I took the Geiger counter and they keep tracking the hot spots. One Russian guy – some kind of scientist – told me he wore a lead undergarment. I didn’t ask to see it, but maybe I shou
ld have – must’ve chafed!’
‘You’ve got to change vehicles when you reach the restricted zone,’ says Vee. ‘That’s the funny part. We all totter off the rusting press bus and get allocated seats in the limos that haven’t been allowed to leave the area. So I’m being driven through Pripyat in this crazy fucking Zil – the only time I’ll ever get a ride in one of those.’
Rob is wiping his mouth with his napkin.
‘That restricted zone is a waste of time,’ he says. ‘They can’t agree on its boundaries but it’s arbitrary, out of date and it’s holding back my trucks. There’s a good road cuts round to the east from Belarus and then straight down to Kiev, but because of some Ministry knee-jerker they set up a new layer of checkpoints and now we have to live with it.’
Rachel pushes away her mushrooms, worried suddenly about where they were grown. Has Lucas been careful? Has he brought back any radioactive dust to their flat? Don’t be selfish, she tells herself, as the vodka washes through her. The damage is done already – those children in bleak hospitals, those sick little babies being born, those recent spikes in thyroid cancer that Lucas tells her people have been protesting about. Their mothers had been trapped in that monstrous toxic cloud.
‘Well, I’m not sure I’ll go back,’ says Lucas, as the dishes are cleared and the pork cutlets are delivered, each bearing a garnish of limp dill. ‘Not unless I get a commission. Anyway, interest will most likely die down now until the tenth anniversary, unless there’s another fuck-up. That’s the trouble with this place. Everyone looks backwards – to Chernobyl, to the Soviets, to the Great Patriotic War. There’s a line between real news and digging over old bones dressed up as analysis that frankly, sometimes, feels gratuitous.’
Vee rolls her eyes, comically. ‘It’s your job, you dick. You love it, so stop pontificating.’
Lucas leans forward. He won’t be put off. He’s out to impress one of the new breed, thinks Rachel. He is making it up as he goes along.
‘I’m after a story that looks to the future,’ he continues. ‘Something to develop, get my teeth into, something that’s not already being recycled by every junior anchor on the ten-day tour of former satellite states.’
He stops to pour himself another vodka. Vee flicks her hand. ‘Hey,’ she teases. ‘Mister Loo-cas! Forget Bosnia! Forget the Middle East! Dontcha geddit? History’s all we got!’
‘That’s not what I meant,’ says Lucas. There’s a hint of petulance about him, as if he has been caught trying out different versions of himself. ‘I’m looking ahead. I’ve got some leads.’
‘Great!’ says Vee. Then, widening her eyes for Ivan and raising her voice to a cartoonish pitch: ‘Whaddya know, little buddy – your daddy’s gonna scoop us all!’
Half an hour later, once the vodka has numbed their nerve-endings and the plates have been cleared, the two men are telling stories. Rob recounts some trouble with the Hungarian border police over a shipment of chrome bar stools he had to dole out as bribes. Lucas makes everyone laugh with a tale about an angry old man shouting ‘knees!’ in his underpants. It takes a minute or two for Rachel to realise he is talking about the encounter with the boy and the man from the flat on the fourteenth floor. The old man had been wearing trousers, remembers Rachel, but when Lucas tells the story, it sounds like something else – a story about an idiot or a pimp. He makes it sound funny.
Vee has moved her chair over to the top end of the table so that she can smoke away from the baby. Rachel, meanwhile, is trying to nurse Ivan. She has draped a shawl around her shoulders in an attempt to be discreet, but he keeps waving his arm and pushing it away. It doesn’t seem to matter. The women by the door have been joined by a trio of pasty-faced young men dressed in shiny nylon shell suits and branded trainers. They order a bottle of Chivas Regal and drink it with frowning intensity.
‘So,’ murmurs Suzie, leaning forward to catch Ivan’s flailing hand. She pats it a little. ‘I’m dying to know. What is it like to have a baby?’
Rachel looks up, pulled out of her reverie. Rob, she remembers, won’t let Suzie have a child.
‘Oh,’ she says, warily, ‘you know. Pretty amazing. Tiring. And amazing.’
Suzie smiles, frowning at the same time, as if she’s puzzling over something. ‘Yes. But how does it feel? What did you feel when you first held him in your arms?’
Right now, Rachel is starting to feel dizzy. The brick pillar has split into two, the sides moving in and crossing over like a Venn diagram. She focuses instead on Suzie, at a tiny white scar just below her left eyebrow. Something in Suzie’s earnest, searching gaze makes her want to speak honestly, to reach for something true. Or maybe it is the vodka.
‘It was a shock,’ she says. ‘I had a shock, the night Ivan was born.’ She bends her neck and brushes her lips against Ivan’s downy head. ‘It wasn’t the pain, or the mess, or caring about what Lucas might think, seeing me that way. The shock came afterwards, when I’d stopped shaking and the stitches were in and the blood was washed off.’ Rachel pauses. She remembers the bright light above her head; the midwife lifting her feet out of the stirrups and pressing down on her uterus to expel the afterbirth. ‘Lucas had gone home to our flat, and the ward was as quiet as it was going to get and the lights had been dimmed and the nurse had finished her checks or obs or whatever they call them. Ivan looked so peaceful in his cot beside my bed, and I didn’t love him yet, but the antenatal classes had been very reassuring about all of that and I suppose I felt happy and proud and ready to learn. There was just one more thing to do before I could sleep and that was to go and brush my teeth.’
Suzie nods, as though all of this is as she expected.
‘And you got up and went to the bathroom?’
Rachel thinks back, trying and trying to catch hold of what it was she had done.
‘No. I pulled my gown around me, and checked that I wasn’t – you know – leaking, then swung my legs over the side of the bed. I felt a bit wobbly, I suppose, but I decided I’d be all right. Then, just as I stood up, Ivan made a squeaking sound and moved his head so that his nose was pressed against the mattress. I didn’t know how to turn him over without hurting him, so I picked him up and held him across my stomach, which felt all spongy and strange. The nurses were busy at their station, you see, and I didn’t think I could walk without dropping him so I leaned there against the bed, until my arms were stiff and aching. Tears were falling down my cheeks and on to Ivan’s head and I remember they pooled in that little hollow that new babies have – where their skulls haven’t fused.’
She stops, the sickly scent of baby powder and her own sweat returning, washed up on a tide of fear.
‘And?’ presses Suzie.
‘Then a midwife came by. I think she took the baby. She kept asking me what I was trying to do.’
‘What did you tell her?’
Rachel falters again; she tries to pin down the formless things that waver in her mind’s eye.
‘I don’t know. I . . . I didn’t know.’
She raises her head and sees that Vee and Lucas and Rob are listening. Lucas is looking down, tracing the curve of a plate very slowly with his finger. Rob has his hand under the table. The little green Lacoste crocodile on the front of his shirt inches back and forth as he kneads his wife’s thigh.
‘Excuse me,’ murmurs Rachel, standing up. She hands Ivan to Lucas, who, she knows, longs for her to tell a funny story like everyone else, something that might make her seem a little kooky and unpredictable and desirable and so explain her presence here, with him, in this restaurant, in this city. ‘I just . . .’ She searches for the words that keep floating out of her reach. ‘I’ll be back in a minute.’ With her shawl pulled tight across her chest, she weaves her way between the tables and chairs towards the bathroom. A man in a dark suit sits at a table in her path. He has to uncross his legs to let her through, and as she passes he turns his head wit
h a small frown that might express concern or irritation. Rachel assumes it is the latter. She pushes her way into the cubicle and locks the flimsy door.
Ten minutes later, after her racing heartbeat has slowed and she has dried her tears on a sheet of grey toilet paper, she returns to the restaurant. The man in the suit has gone and Lucas is jiggling Ivan ineffectually against his shoulder. She slides back into her seat beside her husband. Vee is saying something to Suzie and Rob, more vodka has been poured and there is a stiffness now, a new wariness around the table.
‘. . . It pays quite well,’ finishes Vee. ‘So, how about it?’
Rob’s head is moving up and down in a series of tiny nods, as if he’s thinking about what Vee has just said. ‘Thanks, but Suzie doesn’t need a job,’ he replies, carefully.
Vee raises an eyebrow. ‘It’s only three days’ work.’
Now Rob exhales. ‘Hair, nails, all that stuff – they’re full time, aren’t they baby?’ He takes his wife’s hand in his own and rests it between her legs.
Vee blows cigarette smoke over her shoulder. ‘And how is that for you, Suzie?’ she asks. Her voice sounds cool, neutral. She picks an invisible speck off her lip.
‘Oh, this takes work,’ says Suzie, pulling her hand away from Rob and holding it up to reveal her immaculately manicured nails. ‘I do my aerobics for ninety minutes a day. Besides, I’m still sourcing things for the apartment. I’m not looking for a job.’
Lucas shifts in his seat. Ivan starts to grizzle: warning signs. Rachel takes the baby from him, hoping someone has asked for the bill, but Rob, it seems, still has things he wants to say.
‘My wife,’ he says, raising his glass. ‘She has everything she needs. She likes to look good. But do you know the best thing about her? No? Well I’ll tell you. It’s that gap between her thighs.’
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