A box of After Eights. Her box – the one she threw down the rubbish chute.
Carefully, she lies Ivan down on his back across the desk and stretches over the chair to reach it. She raises the dented lid, runs her forefinger across the waxy sleeves. There’s no folded slip of paper, no hidden note; just a soft rustle like shifting sand and a fusty smell that mingles with a trace of peppermint.
‘Shto?’
The harsh voice behind her makes Rachel jump. In the same moment she sees two arthritic hands in fingerless gloves reaching forward. The hands pick up her son, who grabs hold of the teacup, and when Rachel turns round the caretaker is clutching Ivan to her chest and Ivan is opening his mouth to bawl, so she lets go of the box and all three of them look down to where dark squares are fluttering and thousands upon thousands of tiny black seeds are spilling and spinning across the cold floor.
Rachel needs her baby back, but the old woman is holding him tight. Her wrinkled face is no longer a mesh of disapproval. Instead, her mouth is open and her eyes are aghast. Something terrible is happening here. Something terrible has already happened.
* * *
Dreams bleed into memory and memory sinks into dream. Later that night, dogs bark as Elena Vasilyevna moans in her sleep. The old caretaker sees dark water; bodies glistening in the reeds. She is fishing, or trying to, for she has no lines or nets.
Her sister is crying. That English baby is crying while his mother makes strange noises, opening then shutting her mouth.
Elena should have told her. The river cannot feed them. The fish are all gone.
Chapter 9
Lucas wakes on the morning of the twenty-fifth of December to find his legs trapped in a tangle of bedsheets. When he rolls over he pushes a solid object with his foot. It lands on the floor with a dull thump. His head is hurting, his mouth tastes of sick and something that feels like a strand of hair is caught at the back of his throat. He buries his face into the pillow. He wants to hide from the cold light that is seeping under the fringed curtain but a question nags him back into consciousness. What has he knocked off the bed?
He levers himself up, sees that he is alone and peers over the side of the mattress. On the floor is a dark shape, like a lumpy forearm or a badly packed Christmas stocking. With a grunt he reaches out and scoops it up. There’s a label attached with an elastic band. ‘To Daddy,’ it reads. ‘From Santa xx.’ It is a Christmas stocking.
‘Rach?’ he croaks. His voice isn’t working so he puts his hand into the top of the sock – not a thick sock, just one of his black work socks with a small hole in the heel. The contents, as he pulls them out, seem rather apt, in the circumstances – a bottle of imported Heineken, a six-pack of Bic lighters, a handful of walnuts in their shells and, in the toe, a shiny pair of nail clippers. The lighters make him want a cigarette and he contemplates an illicit one in bed until the fact that he is now a father breaks over him once again. Instead he leans back, opens the beer on edge of the headboard and tries to reassemble the events of the night before. He didn’t get back from Crimea until eleven and he hadn’t been through the door for more than three minutes before it all kicked off.
They’d had sex, him and Rachel – he is almost certain of this. The details are hazy – he remembers worrying that the two mattresses pushed together might suddenly separate and land them both on the floor. He takes a swig of his beer and then he feels guilty. They’d argued for a long time beforehand, Rachel weeping because he’d not brought any Pampers, then because he’d lost that stupid novel she’d picked up from somewhere and she might even have cried something about a Baba Yaga, though he’d probably dreamt that part. Anyway, he’d been too busy insisting that it was impossible to buy what wasn’t for sale and that this was a crap homecoming.
The problem, nevertheless, was that while the crap might be true, it was also true that he’d had a great time away from Kiev. What was it Sorin had said when the omnipresent press secretary had popped up at that junket vodka reception in Dnepropetrovsk? ‘A man must know when to be with his wife, and when to stay away.’ Straight out of the dark ages, and just the sort of Slavic macho anachronism Lucas could riff with in a slot on From Our Own Correspondent. All the same, he knew what Sorin meant. He’d smoked in the hotel bathroom, jacked off when the mood took him and, most important of all, he’d felt like a journalist again, wandering around, asking questions, observing and speculating without worrying about how to justify his actions.
Lucas tries to crack a walnut with the nail clippers but the shell is a bugger.
Things start to look up when he smells coffee and French toast.
‘Hey, Rachie, Merry Christmas!’ he says, strolling into the kitchen and kissing her on the mouth with the smell of beer on his breath. He produces an over-priced store-wrapped silk scarf, a box of German lebkuchen and, finally, an enormous plastic binliner with a Russian-made baby carrier inside. ‘Don’t read anything sinister into it,’ he pleads. ‘I just want to make life a little easier for both of us.’ The baby carrier is rigid, square, with thick shoulder straps, an aluminium frame and a simple canvas hammock for Ivan to sit in. Lucas had to leave it outside the front door the night before so that Rachel wouldn’t find it.
‘Thank you,’ she says, knowing she has been unreasonable about the Pampers. Lucas would have bought some if he could.
Rachel’s gift to Lucas is a set of mugs she found in a craft shop in Podil. They are rough to the touch, like sandpaper, with an unusual dark grey glaze lining the insides. One of them shatters as soon as she pours hot water into it.
There is a parcel, too, from Lucas’s mother that she’d sent to the office. Socks for Lucas, gloves for Rachel and a hat and mittens set for Ivan. ‘Cashmere! Hand wash only!’ says the scrawl in the card. Rachel strokes the gloves along her cheek and drinks in the pale amethyst colour.
Nothing has arrived from her own mother.
‘Why don’t you give her a call?’ suggests Lucas. ‘You can’t stay incommunicado for ever.’
‘Maybe,’ murmurs Rachel, vaguely. All she had sent her mother was a postcard with a bland greeting in Russian she bought at a kiosk near the monastery. She had tried to please her the previous Christmas when she and Lucas had visited the bungalow. It hadn’t gone well. This year she hadn’t expected a present – not really. But ignoring Ivan was deliberate, and mean.
At midday Lucas nips out to the office. He needs to check in with Zoya, who isn’t answering the phone.
‘Odd,’ he says. ‘She told me she wouldn’t take time off in December. I thought she was saving it for the new year holiday next week. Hey, do you want to come too? You could give that baby carrier its first outing.’
Rachel shakes her head. ‘Ivan’s coming down with a cold,’ she says. ‘I’ll practise indoors.’
Lucas’s hand is on the door catch.
‘You are okay, aren’t you?’ he asks. ‘After last night?’
‘I’m fine,’ she says, with a quick smile. ‘I’m glad you’re home. I’m fine.’
* * *
In the evening, Vee comes for dinner. She brings a festive litre of Stolichnaya with a red ribbon tied round its neck, and a knitted toy with stuck-on googly eyes for Ivan that he’ll chew and choke on if Rachel doesn’t remove them first. Lucas fusses over the chicken he picked up in the Bessarabsky market, while Rachel slips the toy into a drawer and looks after the rest of the meal – carrots, red cabbage, onion stuffing, bread sauce made with UHT milk and some last-minute spaghetti. The potatoes she’d left under the sink have gone rotten in the middle.
Lucas jokes that Vee has turned up because she wants to fleece him for stories. Vee jokes that she’s come to see Rachel and Ivan, not him.
‘So, have you started the survey yet?’ she asks Rachel, to prove her point.
‘Sort of,’ says Rachel, draining the spaghetti by tipping the saucepan and holding it back with a knife. A few pale strand
s slip over the top and threaten to take the rest with them in a slimy cascade. ‘I’ve done the basic fruit and veg and some dried stuff like this pasta . . . toothpaste and shampoo were easy, but electrical goods and furnishings – I don’t know where to start.’
‘A new place has just opened down off Khreschatyk,’ suggests Vee. ‘A basement store, plenty of stock, German brands.’
Rachel turns to the kitchen table and starts plating up.
‘Teddy says those places are all run by gangsters.’
‘You’ve seen Teddy? God, I thought he’d vanished to some love nest with that new boyfriend of his. Well, he’s right, but honestly, don’t let it worry you. Those mafia guys aren’t threatened by an expat consumer survey. Just get Zoya to run you there, check a few tickets and say you’re looking for the washing machine that your husband has so far failed to provide!’
‘Shut up,’ says Lucas, grumpily, as Vee picks at a tail of spaghetti that has stuck to the pan, then dangles it above her mouth and drops it in. ‘Anyway, Zoya, it appears, went A.W.O.L. while I was away. I couldn’t get hold of her today, and London aren’t happy because we missed a technical inventory, so she won’t be running Rachel around any time soon.’
‘Oh dear.’ Vee smiles at Rachel as she is handed a plate. ‘Then why don’t you fire her?’
‘I can’t fire her. When she’s on form, she’s the best. Trouble is she knows it and takes the piss. She’ll be moonlighting somewhere, probably translating for one of the Nordic embassies . . .’ Lucas takes a sharp swig of his beer. ‘Anyway, when she is around she’s always so disapproving, questioning my story ideas. She’s ambitious. Probably wants a Ukrainian Service job and a stint in London, but if she expects a good word from me she’s going to have to start providing some proper support.’
‘So,’ says Vee. ‘If I take Zoya out and get her drunk, will she tell me what you’ve been plotting with Sorin? I know you’re working on something!’
Lucas pulls a face of mock pity.
‘Good luck with that. I don’t think she drinks. Or if she does, she’ll drink you under the table. Anyway, I had a great time on my travels, thanks very much for asking.’
‘So what did you discover? Did you go down a coalmine in Donbas?’
‘I did, as it happens. The lift was terrifying – you leave your stomach behind and it’s so fucking deep and black – though, as you’d expect, everything else was stage-managed as usual and I didn’t need to go all that way to hear them deny the stats about stillborn births, unpaid wages and the rest. The whole of eastern Ukraine is an environmental disaster zone, but the old guard aren’t about to roll over and die. Crimea was more fun. I got some ranting vox pops from ethnic Russians and several bottles of sticky Massandra wine, as well as a few bulletins about the Black Sea fleet. It’s a weird mix – shifty, militarised with a seaside café culture. We should fly down there for a weekend, Rach – maybe in the summer. The coastline is to die for. We could stay in one of the state sanatoria, take Ivan for a paddle.’
‘Nice diversion, Lulu,’ says Vee, waving her fork, notching up a stroke on an invisible tally. ‘I’ve not forgotten there’s something you’re not telling me. You’ve got a story you’re keeping secret!’ She turns to Rachel. ‘Hey, you okay? You’re not eating! I hope you’re not on a diet. Have you seen how skinny that Suzie woman is getting? I bumped into her husband at the Interior Ministry, knee deep in shit, I bet. What a creep.’
Rachel remembers something about Rob and his trucks coming in from Finland. Suzie had told her he could get hold of anything. Perhaps he could find some Pampers.
‘I’m not hungry,’ she says. ‘Have some more chicken.’
‘Did you call your mum?’ asks Lucas.
Rachel pinches the skin on the inside of her wrist. ‘I forgot.’
* * *
‘Off to Russia. Pregnant.’ Rachel’s mother had expelled her daughter’s news like a pip or a piece of eggshell.
Rachel gazed out of the kitchen window, across her mother’s grey December garden to the bare, diminished shrubs and the bonfire patch with its tide of sticky ash where her father used to burn hedge trimmings and leaves. Lucas was out there having a smoke by the compost bin, flicking his butts into a pile of vegetable peelings.
‘It’s not Russia,’ she said. ‘It’s the Ukraine.’
‘How far gone?’
She shifted her weight so that her still-flat abdomen brushed against the edge of the sink. ‘Thirteen weeks.’
‘Well you can’t take a baby out there, whatever they’re calling it. Your husband has to concentrate on his job. You’ll have to stay here.’
Rachel hated the way her mother said ‘your husband’. She kept her hands in the washing up bowl, pushing them down so that her palms pressed flat against the base, the warm water her only comfort as its soapy meniscus clung to her forearms. Her mother’s irritation would expand, she knew, in the silence.
‘I’m going to have the baby in London,’ she said. ‘St Thomas’s. I’ve already had two scans. Lucas will come back for the birth. It won’t be a problem. Then we can fly out together.’
Her mother hadn’t moved, despite the fact that the dining table was still only half-cleared and the turkey carcass was waiting to be stripped and the Christmas place mats needed wiping.
‘But you’re not being sensible or responsible. You’ll be nursing the baby. You won’t get any sleep. The baby will need immunisations – polio, whooping cough, all of that. I’ll have to clear out your old bedroom. Honestly, Rachel! You’ve no idea about what you put me through. You never have.’
‘Mum,’ said Rachel, suddenly angry. ‘I’m going to Kiev and I’m going to love this baby. I’m not like you or Dad.’ She took a quick breath, then half turned as if to snatch the words back, but it was too late for that.
Her mother stepped up close.
‘I can’t help you, out there,’ she said, gripping the gravy boat with its residue of whitish fat.
Rachel took her time with the last plate. ‘Don’t worry,’ she muttered. ‘I won’t ask you.’
* * *
While Vee and Lucas go through to the living room and out on to the balcony to smoke, Rachel stays in the kitchen to give Ivan his night-time feed. Breastfeeding is more efficient, now – automatic even, and almost pain-free. Ivan pushes his shoulder up against her ribs with his dense, solid warmth. His hand rests proprietorially. His eyes roll back and his lids
droop.
As she holds him, her eyes drift to the Christmas card from Lucas’s mother. The picture is a painting by one of those old Dutch masters – Brueghel or Van something – a skating scene.
Ivan doesn’t know about Christmas, thinks Rachel. She looks down at the baby who came out of her, who is now so completely and utterly separate in his difference, in his vision of the world and everything he will ever experience or feel or understand. When she was a teenager, she used to lie on her bed beneath the window and look up at the sky through a frame she made with her fingers. Sometimes the sky was grey. Sometimes it was blue, or black. But she didn’t think you could tell, just by looking, whether it was ice cold and freezing, or hot and burning. You might be a girl in Eastleigh or a penguin in Antarctica or her dad with a new wife in Singapore, or maybe the sky wasn’t blue at all in someone else’s head, but red, or yellow or some other colour she couldn’t even imagine. No one could be sure. No one could see what she saw.
Now her baby must live in his own version of the world, just as she does. The thought is unbearable to her, and she wants to share something with him, help him feel less alone, even if it is the tired tropes of Christmas trees and carol singers and glowing log fires in pictures on cards, so she starts to sing, hesitantly, rocking him in her arms.
Silent night, holy night
All is calm, all is bright . . .
She can’t remember the next line, so s
he tries something else.
Oh come, all ye faithful . . .
Again the words are swallowed by the louder voice in her head, or maybe she never really knew the words at all, but instead sang them without thinking from a dog-eared hymn book in the school hall, rocking back on her heels, cheeks flushed red as she bellowed the last two lines.
Oh come let us adore him,
Chri-ist the lord.
* * *
Rachel and Ivan are both dozing off when the doorbell rings. The sound makes Ivan’s arms fly out and his newly erupted tooth bites into her breast. She hears Lucas open the door and say goodbye to Vee, then other voices murmur. Perhaps it is Zoya, she thinks, bringing news of a resignation or a scandal with that fierce pout of hers. However, next she hears some rapid Russian, and a boy’s voice speaking in halting English.
After a minute or two the front door closes and Lucas walks down the hallway.
‘Hey,’ he says, as he sits down and peels off the fingerless gloves he wears for smoking on the balcony. ‘It’s cold out there. Vee asked me to say goodbye – she didn’t want to wake Ivan. Happy Christmas.’
‘Who was at the door?’ asks Rachel.
‘The dezhornaya,’ says Lucas. ‘She doesn’t seem to realise that it’s past midnight, or that it’s Christmas in some parts of the world, or that I speak Russian. She brought that sulky-looking boy from upstairs with her to translate.’
Rachel cradles Ivan’s head with one hand as she rummages under her shirt for the clip on her bra strap. ‘I met her – the other day. We had a bit of a confrontation.’
Lucas looks alarmed.
‘Were you okay?’
Rachel doesn’t know how to answer this question. The old woman caught her trespassing in her cubicle. Rachel spilled her seeds all over the floor. The old woman cried, Rachel ran up the stairs with Ivan, then later the abandoned pushchair had appeared by the front door, a little dented, but otherwise still serviceable.
Snegurochka Page 9