‘That what?’ Vee narrows her eyes.
‘That gap – you know, between a woman’s legs! Her triangle of light. I couldn’t be with a woman who doesn’t have one.’
‘Oh please . . .’
‘That’s just it,’ says Rob, leaning his elbow on the table and pointing a finger at Vee. ‘You think I’m making some kind of sick joke because I don’t talk a lot of righteous crap like you lot. But I know what I want and that’s the deal and Suzie understands that. See?’ He tugs on Suzie’s arm. Instead of pulling away again, Suzie rises jerkily to her feet, turns round and thrusts out her backside. She is wearing a pair of white jeans that stretch across her buttocks and pull tight between her thighs.
‘You bastard,’ Vee says. ‘Time to go.’
‘I’ll get the bill,’ says Lucas, thickly. He waves to the waitress, but she is staring at the wall.
Rachel looks at Suzie and fear fills her throat, because Suzie’s face has changed; it is closed and brittle now as she turns back towards her husband.
‘It’s sorted,’ says Rob, and he takes the remaining bottle of vodka, pushes back his chair and heads over to the shell-suited young men. ‘Jesus,’ he mutters over his shoulder. ‘You journalists should fuck off to Sarajevo.’
* * *
‘You could do it,’ says Vee, who seems remarkably cheerful after their sudden departure from the restaurant. She is sitting next to Rachel and Ivan on the back seat of the fume-filled Volga she flagged down to take them home.
‘Do what?’ asks Lucas, trying to turn round in the front passenger seat. He gives up and slumps back. The driver, a young man in a Dynamo Kyiv bobble hat, is hunched behind the wheel, eating sunflower seeds from a bag on the dashboard. His gearstick is sporting a jaunty crocheted cover and Rachel wonders if his grandmother, or maybe his girlfriend, made it for him.
Vee yanks on Lucas’s scarf.
‘The cost of living survey! For the UN! The job I was telling Suzie about. I thought she was going to say yes until that prick gave us the benefit of his misogyny. I should have thought of Rachel first.’
‘What?’ Rachel raises her head from where she was resting it against the freezing window. The night outside is dark and mysterious beyond the steady repetition of the streetlamps. They remind her of a zoetrope she once saw as part of a touring exhibition that came to the library in Lyndhurst. You were supposed to focus on the flickering pictures, yet all she saw were the shadows in between.
‘You’re a mom!’ persists Vee. ‘You’re going to need that stuff in the survey, and they’ll pay you five hundred bucks. Just visit a few stores and write down the ticket prices.’
‘Oh. The survey. Yes, I suppose so.’
‘Great.’ Vee sits back. ‘I’ll tell the woman at the mission to call you. They’ve been trying for a while to find a third party. You’re what they call an impartial expatriate.’
‘Okay,’ murmurs Rachel, but she’s not thinking about the survey. She can’t get Suzie out of her head. Suzie who bakes apple cake and wears white angora and speaks with a gentle Edinburgh accent. Refined Suzie. Except she isn’t those things at all. Or at least, she wasn’t tonight.
The apartment block is quiet when she and Lucas return. The lift appears when summoned and there’s no sign of the caretaker. Back on the thirteenth floor, Lucas retreats to the balcony for a smoke while Rachel feeds Ivan and settles him into his cot. In the bedroom, the full moon slides through the gap in the curtains and across the shiny parquet. Rachel undresses slowly; she hasn’t drunk as much as the others, but two modest shots of vodka leave her reeling a little. Her skin is white in the moonlight. She pulls open the wardrobe door and stands in front of the mirror in her knickers. Her stomach rolls over the top of the elastic and stretchmarks gleam their silvery trails across her hips. She turns, looks over her shoulder, twisting her neck, but all she sees is the drooping shadow in the overhang of her buttocks. There’s no thigh gap. No triangle of light.
‘Hey,’ Lucas says, stumbling in from the hallway as she climbs into bed. ‘We should do that again.’
‘I don’t think so,’ says Rachel, wondering if her husband had even registered what Rob had said.
‘I don’t mean see them. I mean just – go out. Meet people. Have fun. I worry about you, Rach. You need friends, especially when I’m away.’
‘What?’ Rachel raises her head, twisting round. Lucas has his back to her as he peels off his socks.
‘Ah – didn’t I tell you? I meant to tell you before dinner,’ he says. ‘The Ukrainian Service editor called – she wants voices from the regions. I couldn’t say no. It’s only a week – commissions guaranteed. Looks like I’m going on a trip.’
Chapter 7
The first proper snow falls on the morning of Lucas’s departure. While he packs, then shaves, stooping in front of the small mirror in the bathroom, Rachel pulls back the nets and stands at the bedroom window with Ivan in her arms. She watches as the shapes below her soften, the concrete paths become white ribbons and a small lorry fan-tails across the tramlines. When snowflakes drift out of the greyness they don’t always fall, she thinks. Sometimes, they rise. When you are already high in the sky, the air currents lift you and push you up against the building and out and round again. Perhaps you never reach the ground.
‘Lviv tonight and tomorrow,’ calls Lucas, above the whirring of his electric razor. ‘Zoya has the phone numbers. Then three days in the Donbas and a couple in Crimea. More if she can get me a permit for Sevastopol. The Russians are still rattling their sabres.’
Ivan is in the shuddering phase after a prolonged bout of screaming. His eyelids droop, his damp head lolls from the exhaustion of his assault upon himself, yet every time Rachel turns towards his cot the crying begins again. So she flicks off the lamp and rocks him in the strange blank snow light, swaying from one hip to the other in a movement that sometimes she continues even when she isn’t holding him; when her body, no longer weighted, tries to float up into the air.
‘Once upon a time,’ she whispers, ‘once upon a time there lived a little old man and a little old woman in a hut in the middle of the forest.’ She pauses, brushing Ivan’s ear with her lips. There’s a story about the snow buried deep in her childhood. If she thinks too hard she won’t remember, but if she speaks it, she might. ‘They had enough to eat and plenty of kindling for the fire and they had each other, yet still this wasn’t enough. They longed for a child.’
The whirring sound stops in the bathroom.
‘Then one winter,’ she continues, pressing her forehead against the cold glass, ‘when the snow lay deep and thick on the ground, the old couple went outside and made a child out of snow.’
‘I know this story,’ says Lucas from somewhere behind her. ‘Snegurochka, the little snow maiden. She melts in the spring. Mind you, these days poor Snegurochka has Ded Moroz for a sugar daddy. She’s morphed into some busty blond with plaited hair extensions handing out free samples of coke in a spangly cape down in Independence Square.’ He pulls open a drawer. ‘The nationalists hate those Russian folktales, but as long as Snegurochka dispenses gifts, she’s a keeper.’
Rachel stops swaying. She thinks she can see a figure far below – a smudge, really, sweeping the path that leads away from the flats towards the road. Is it the caretaker? She looks like a small grey crab, jabbing and flailing.
‘Sometimes the caretaker comes up in the lift and leaves Ivan’s dirty nappies on the doormat,’ she says.
‘What? Oh Jesus, that old witch is such a communist. I’ll get Zoya to put her straight.’
‘Zoya says it’s not her job,’ Rachel reminds him. ‘Anyway, she says the caretaker hates nappies because they can’t be re-used. Plastic, cardboard, food waste is all good. But not dirty nappies.’ She touches the bridge of her nose, comforted by the familiar contours of cartilage and bone. ‘Do you think we could buy a washing machine
soon?’
Lucas packs his aftershave into his holdall and steps over to the window. Small words can open deep chasms, he finds. He never knows what might set his wife off these days, or cause her to retreat into the dull silence that made him put that call in to his editor at Bush House. It’s just a short trip he’s taking, so he can clear his head.
‘Maybe,’ he answers, cautiously. ‘We’ve maxed out on Visa, but I’ll be earning while I’m away. Then in the new year I’ll focus on my film project.’ Another pause. ‘Vee says she’ll call you. But if you’re worried, I mean, worried about anything – the snow, Ivan – you could use the emergency office dollars. Zoya can always book you a flight. You could go back to the UK and spend Christmas with your mum. I bet she’s missing you, even if she’s crap at showing it.’
Rachel has been waiting for this. She knows it would be the sensible thing to do – the midwife, her GP, the few acquaintances she can call on in London would all agree. The prospect cannot be allowed to distract her. Fear, ever-present, makes Rachel grip Ivan more tightly. Instead she recalls her parents’ fifties bungalow: her old bedroom with the stained hand basin in the corner and the pyrocanthus scratching at the window; the cramped porch where her father used to smoke before he took himself on a golfing holiday to Singapore and never came back. Her mother blamed Rachel, the child who had made her tedious. Rachel pictures her now, slicing carrots in the kitchen, fist gripping the knife, hammering it down on the red formica worktop, never looking her daughter in the eye, never asking the right question.
‘I like the snow,’ she says, counting Ivan’s ten toes with her fingers, the ten days that Lucas will be away, each with its five separate parts: sleeping, feeding, washing, shopping, reading. Truly, when she parcels it up like that it’s not so bad. ‘And anyway, we can’t afford the flights. Though if you see any Pampers in Lviv . . . the sixteen to twenty-four pound size?’
‘I know!’ Lucas says, with a look that might be relief, or disappointment. ‘I know! Top of my list!’
* * *
Once Lucas has left and the tail lights of his taxi have vanished into the weather, Rachel attends to her routines. First she steps into the living room and shunts the sofa up against the balcony door. Then she moves the telephone out to the hallway, setting it up on the cheaply laminated bureau with the three-sided vanity mirror next to the front door. As she closes the living room door she wedges a kitchen chair beneath the handle.
‘The tropical rain fell in great drenching sheets,’ she murmurs, as if an incantation from her lost book might set a seal on her actions.
At midday she mashes a little stewed carrot into Ivan’s flaked rice. She washes all the bedlinen in the bath and hangs it to dry on a clothes rack in the bedroom, then realigns the depleted pile of Pampers in the drawer beneath the bed, despite her nagging awareness that Ivan has outgrown the size she brought with her from London. In the afternoon she takes her son outside in the pushchair, piling on the blankets to protect him from the caretaker’s disapproval as much as the cold. She learns to dislodge the build-up of slush around the wheels with a quick jab of her boot, and counts the strange, floating balls of mistletoe in the tops of the bare trees. At night, she re-reads chapters from Baby’s First Year, staring at the photographs of cluttered British homes, their chaos carefully constructed and cropped to put new mothers at their ease. Sometimes, when the squeaking starts up, she thinks about the rollerblading boy and the old man in the flat above her head, but she never meets anyone on the landing.
Then, one day, as she stoops to remove the dirty nappy that, yet again, the caretaker has deposited on the mat outside the front door, she finds a note tucked underneath it, written on a piece of thin squared paper that looks as if it has been torn from an exercise book. The note consists of two words:
Close windows!
It seems the caretaker knows a little English, but Rachel doesn’t understand. Is this a warning, or an admonition? The windows aren’t open. She picks up the nappy, places it back inside the rubbish chute and slams the steel door shut with a clang that makes her teeth rattle.
Later that afternoon, as she draws the curtains in the bedroom against the creeping dark, the telephone rings. Its harsh vibrations repeat along the parquet. Rachel scoops up Ivan, who is trying to pull himself along, knees beneath his hips, ready to crawl. His head bobs against her collarbone as she hurries from the bedroom. His grubby fingers clutch her shirt, but he is quiet. As Rachel bends down to lift the receiver from its cradle on the bureau, she sees her reflection in the three-sided mirror – a triptych of mother and child, strangely familiar, like a painting in a church.
‘Allo?’ she says, as Lucas has taught her. It can only be one of four people, she thinks.
‘Adeen, dva, tree . . .’ she counts.
The silence presses against her ear.
* * *
When Rachel was nine, her mother caught her thinking. Rachel was sitting on the swing in the narrow garden behind the bungalow. Her legs were a little too long already for the height of the seat so she’d tucked them under as she rocked back and forth, gently scuffing the toes of her sandals on the paving slab her father had placed there.
‘Rachel?’ shouted her mother from the kitchen window, hidden from view behind ragged stems of buddleia. Rachel didn’t know what her mother wanted, but she knew it would be a chore of some sort, so she slid off the swing and lay down on her side by the hedge, hoping no one would find her. She was just beginning to relax, enjoying the sensation of looking at the swing from a new angle while her lips formed the shape of the swear word she’d gleaned from the older children next door when her mother shouted again.
‘Don’t think I don’t know what you’re up to, trying to hide. Come inside now!’
At any other time, her mother’s words might have washed over her and meant nothing, but instead they came at that particular moment; at the exact moment to spark a new thought in Rachel’s mind.
At teatime that evening, as her mother piled spoonfuls of mince and onions onto three plates and then drained the peas, Rachel stared at the back of her head and tried to enter her thoughts. If you can read my mind then that’s a horrible thing to do and you had better stop it because it’s not fair and thoughts are PRIVATE and I HATE you.
‘Is the salt on the table?’ asked her mother, without turning round.
Yes.
‘Rachel – did you hear me?’
YES.
Now her mother looked over her shoulder.
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake – what’s got into you? It’s right under your nose!’
Stop pretending you can’t read my thoughts. I know you can and you should STOP IT RIGHT NOW.
Her mother put her plate of food down in front of her and turned back to the counter. Rachel would have to be careful. Her mother was very sneaky.
* * *
The phone isn’t dead – Rachel can hear a sort of fizzing on the line. Lucas has told her all about phone taps. He says they are still in place all over the city, though no one listens in any more. Rachel ought to replace the receiver, but she hesitates. That woman downstairs, the caretaker, the dezhornaya – isn’t it her job to spy on them all? She sifts through their rubbish with her dirty fingers. What if she is listening? What if she’s been trained, and what if she can hear Rachel breathing and Ivan snuffling through a headset clamped to her ears in her little cubbyhole downstairs? It’s possible – so why not?
‘Gavareetyi po’angliski?’ she tries. ‘Do you speak English?’
More fizzing.
‘All right, then,’ she says, feeling bolder. ‘Here is a message for you. Pass it up to Sorin or Sarin or whoever it is who stole my book. Tell President Kravchuk if you like. People should be allowed to have private thoughts and private conversations. Maybe you’ve been spying for so long you’ve forgotten to stop, down there with your earpiece in and your nasty
prying eyes. What exactly would you do if I said I had a really big secret – a secret about the Russians or nuclear missiles or NATO or an awful terrible thing I might do, up here where you can’t stop me?’
She pauses to catch her breath and stares at her thighs and stomach mirrored three-fold in the glass, along with Ivan’s dangling leg, which is all she can see of him at this angle. Her heart is thumping beneath his downy head. Perhaps it is her reflection that is speaking, another version of herself. The one with no face.
‘I bet you’d do nothing, because you are pointless and no one would care about what you said.’
Silence. Of course, silence. Rachel breathes in the waxy smell of Ivan’s scalp and brushes his forehead with her lips. She is just about to replace the receiver when she hears another click.
‘Allo?’ says a voice.
She freezes.
‘Allo. Good afternoon. Am I speaking to Mrs Porter?’ The words, faint at first, emphasise the P as if it is being punched out of a Dymo machine.
‘Yes . . .’ whispers Rachel. ‘Who is this?’
‘Good afternoon,’ repeats the voice, a woman, her articulation too precise to be British. ‘My name is Lizbette Solwein and I am deputy director of human resources at the UN mission in Kiev. Mrs Porter, I have been given your name as someone who might be willing to undertake an independent consumer survey on behalf of our international staff. May I ask, do you hold a British passport and is this something that might interest you?’
Rachel breathes, in and out, in and out. This stranger can’t have heard; she can’t have heard . . .
‘Mrs Porter? Can you hear me? Mrs Porter?’
‘Yes,’ she manages. ‘Thank you. I see.’
Snegurochka Page 7