Mykola watches her for a moment. His dark eyes are like a weight upon her, but he has Ivan’s dirty things in his hands and she cannot hold his gaze.
‘A mother with a baby should never apologise,’ he says. ‘Nevertheless, you are worried. This survey – the UN are paying you well, I hope, because I think you do not have a washing machine.’
Rachel is startled.
‘How do you know that?’ she asks.
Mykola points to her right hand – the one that is supporting Ivan.
‘Your hands are rough. Your son’s vest has many stains. This is bad and it must change. I want to give you something.’
Rachel covers her right hand with her left. The room is very quiet. She realises that the soft hum and shush from the photocopier has ceased. The newly duplicated survey sits silently in the tray. What was it Teddy had told her? Something about imports and the mafia.
‘I must go,’ she says.
‘Yes, you must go. First, however, I want you to have something every mother needs. A gift. Not one of these,’ he waves towards the shop, ‘but good, nevertheless. I have machines that are a little older, maybe a dent or two, guarantees expired. I cannot sell them – my customers want everything to be perfect; it is natural. You see, I can help you with this.’
‘I have no money,’ says Rachel, slowly. Her head is spinning again. She knows she ought to take the survey, both copies, and leave, but the sense of unreality overwhelms her.
‘I do not ask for money,’ continues Mykola. ‘Journalists – they are never paid enough! I know these things. Your little boy – so sweet. Let us agree it is a gift for him.’
‘I couldn’t possibly . . .’ murmurs Rachel.
‘Tell me where you live,’ says Mykola.
Rachel stares blankly for a moment.
‘For the delivery! I will send someone to install it.’
‘Oh,’ she says, again. And then, even though something is ringing, a kind of warning tinnitus, the words come tripping out. ‘Staronavodnitska Street. Building Four.’
Mykola has turned his head. She can see a mole above his left temple. His mother must have stared at that when he was a baby, she thinks, when she held him to her breast.
‘Apartment?’ he asks as he picks up the baby carrier and holds it while she slides Ivan’s legs inside. He lifts it carefully onto her shoulders and opens the street door.
The bitter chill almost steals her voice. ‘Thank you,’ she whispers as he offers her the survey, now in an opaque plastic folder. She tries to take it, but he doesn’t quite let go.
‘I understand your caution,’ he says. ‘You are a mother. It is difficult.’
Rachel knows she’ll start to cry if she stands there any longer. Let him be a good man, she thinks. Why can’t he be a good man?
He releases the folder. It is enough.
‘Apartment thirty-four,’ she says. ‘But the lift is sometimes broken.’
* * *
Later that afternoon, behind the thick walls of the monastery, a man removes his lozenge-shaped hat and stoops beneath a doorway. The space inside is dim, the air heavy with the grease and smoke from burning tapers and the smell of bodies sweating beneath thick layers of clothing. The man knows that with a flick of his hand he could have the little Church of the Nativity of the Holy Mother of God to himself. Two monks stand ready to shoo away other worshippers, but the crowd, he believes, is his penance, so he moves to an alcove to cross himself, then kneels down on the cold tiles and mutters his prayers. Two young monks in their black robes wait behind him. Only when he raises his palm do they step forward, bearing a wooden icon between them. It is a triptych, though it is small enough to be carried in one hand.
The icon itself is dull and faded – its colours worn almost away. There are hints of red, brown, some blue and a suggestion of gold in the halo around the Holy Mother’s head and along the edge of the veil that she holds out as she shields the man-baby who sits upright in her lap. The saints and martyrs are ranged like tiny dolls on either side of her, their faces upturned.
The man bows low over the icon. His lips touch the edge of the wood, then he shuffles backwards on his knees and prostrates himself before it, lying face down on the floor while the grey forms of his fellow-worshippers murmur and step over his legs.
Twenty minutes later, when the man has reemerged into the twilight and replaced his hat a skinny boy with close-cropped hair wearing jeans and a nylon anorak sidles up to meet him.
The man in the hat does not like to see a boy with his fingers tucked inside his trouser pockets in this holy place. The boy, however, whispers quickly, and the man is placated, pulling out his wallet and rewarding him with two ten-dollar bills. Satisfied, the boy slides away, pushing his feet across the snowy cobbles as if he is wearing ice skates or cross-country skis. He doesn’t look back until he reaches the corner, at which point he spins full circle on his toes and makes a sign of the cross, touching his forehead, breast and each shoulder with his first two fingers, then pointing them at the man as if to say I see you, Mykola Sirko.
The man in the hat turns away. Perhaps, he shrugs, we see each other.
Chapter 11
The day after Rachel’s trip to the white goods shop someone hammers loudly on the front door of the flat. Rachel has convinced herself that the washing machine was a ruse and she wishes she hadn’t divulged her address. You fool, she thinks, grimly, as she puts her eye to the spyhole. She’ll have to pretend she’s gone out.
Instead she recognises the boy from upstairs. He is with the old woman again, and this time he shouts.
‘Dezhornaya is here!’ he announces. ‘Open door. It is condition of lease!’
Rachel hesitates, then pushes down on the handle. ‘Yes?’ she asks, hoping she sounds annoyed.
The caretaker is standing on the doormat with two bulky string bags in her hands. The boy is behind her, clutching a bucketful of old newspapers. He is wearing the nylon anorak that is too small for him, and a pair of plastic trainers.
‘Dezhornaya,’ he repeats. ‘Elena Vasilyevna. She come to do windows.’
Elena. This is the name of the midwife in Jurassic Park, the one who leaves the nursery window open on page twenty-seven. Her mistake allows the baby raptors to climb in. Rachel frowns as she tries to re-focus. There’d been that note on the doormat. It said ‘Close windows!’ in blue writing.
‘Doesn’t she speak any English?’ she asks.
‘No.’
‘Will it take long? I am very busy . . .’
The boy shrugs. ‘Now I go.’
‘Wait!’ says Rachel, panicking. She’s not sure which is worse, being alone with the caretaker or inviting the boy to stay too. ‘What if I can’t understand her?’
The boy stares for a moment, then steps into the flat, brushing past Rachel. Elena Vasilyevna follows. He opens the living room door and marches straight across to the window that looks out onto the balcony, pushing away the sofa that Rachel still heaves in front of it whenever Lucas goes to work.
‘She will do here and here,’ he says, pointing. ‘All rooms. Leave for spring.’ He looks around at the bookshelves and the furniture, sees a pack of Lucas’s chewing gum on the side table and picks it up. ‘I take?’
‘Yes, thank you, please go,’ says Rachel, quite clear now that she does not want this boy in her flat.
‘Ciao!’ he says, as he saunters out.
Rachel’s palms are sweating. When she shuts the front door behind him, the caretaker Elena is already shuffling down the hallway towards the kitchen. By the time Rachel has secured the lock and caught up with her the newspapers are on the table and Elena is emptying a kilogram bag of rough brown flour into the bucket which is sitting in the sink.
‘Pazhalsta . . .’ begins Rachel, wanting to ask her how long it will take and why she needs flour, but Elena turns and holds
out a green overall she has brought with her. She waggles her fingers, motioning Rachel to put it on. Then she opens a kitchen cupboard, rummages until she finds a suitable saucepan and passes this, too, to Rachel.
‘Seychas,’ she says, ‘davai rabotat.’ Now, work.
* * *
Rachel’s job, it seems, is to sit on the red chair in the living room and tear sheets of newspaper into rectangles the size of a small matchbox. The first pieces are too small, so Elena takes the newspaper from her with a tutting noise and demonstrates the desired proportions. The rectangles go into the saucepan, while Elena turns her attention to her bucket of flour and water. She mixes it with immense concentration, testing it on her tongue and squeezing it between her fingers before pressing the mixture into the gaps between the window and its frame. As soon as she finishes one side, she wipes her hands on her pinafore and begins to layer the newspaper pieces neatly over the paste to create a seal.
Rachel finds the work strangely calming, despite the presence of the old woman in the apartment. Ivan chews on a bread ring in his bouncy chair, perfectly content as long as she rocks him regularly. There is no need to speak. The television news hums softly from the set in the corner. Pictures of a forest somewhere in the Balkans. Two truckloads of skinny soldiers. A square-headed commander in a peaked green cap striding across a hillside. She notices that when the old woman frowns her twisting black eyebrow hairs tangle above her nose. Her misshapen hands shake a little as she works, but there is no point in signalling for her to stop. Elena, she can tell, will complete this task, even to her last breath. If Rachel were to try to prevent her she would never have the courage to cross the foyer downstairs again. So she doesn’t intervene when Elena moves across to the balcony door and seals that up, too. On the contrary, the glued door offers immediate relief from her struggles with the building’s outer fabric. Rachel doesn’t care what Lucas will say. He promised to stop smoking and he hasn’t. She jogs the bouncy chair with her foot and leans forward to smile down at her son.
‘Smatri!’ says Elena, loudly. She is pointing at the television. ‘Simplemente Maria.’
Rachel doesn’t understand.
‘Simplemente Maria!’ Elena moves over to the television and mimes the action of turning up the volume with sharp flicks of her wrist.
‘Oh.’ Rachel rises to her feet and does as she is instructed. She’s noticed Simplemente Maria before, bemused by the Russian dubbing of what appears to be a Mexican soap from the early eighties. The station airs it at least three times a day, in between the aerobics workouts with young women in uncomfortably tiny leotards, so perhaps it is popular: after all, it isn’t hard to follow. Maria the maid gets seduced by the polo player. His shirt is very white against the straw. His long black boots stay on. She still gets pregnant, though. They always show the birth in the closing credits.
This time, however, the plot seems quite complicated; it involves a young girl who is either Maria’s child or Maria as a child or the child of her employers. In the next scene Maria seems older, still with long raven plaits. She is dispensing sugary churros as the cameras linger on her tear-filled eyes and brave half-smile.
As the episode unfolds, Rachel looks over at Elena. The caretaker has finished working at the window and is now leaning against the wall. She has pushed her hands deep into the front pockets of her overall, as if cradling her belly. Her face bears the same expression of deep concentration she wore as she tasted the flour paste; narrow lips pushed out, eyes flicking from one character to another. Rachel turns her attention back to the screen, curious about what so enthrals her. Soon she herself is equally absorbed, puzzling over whether Maria has been penetrated by the family patriarch as well as his playboy son.
When the doorbell rings, both women jump.
Elena straightens up, muttering, disconcerted perhaps to be caught so far from her cubicle downstairs. Rachel responds more slowly. Maybe it is Zoya, who will most likely sneer at both the nature of the drama unfolding on the television and Rachel’s latitude with the caretaker. She crosses to the front door and puts her eye to the spyhole. Something is blocking the light. Then the view clears and she pulls her head back sharply.
The little fish eye lens has shown her the face of a madman.
‘Zdravstvuyte!’ shouts a voice. A fist bangs twice against the door. ‘Steeralnuyu mashinu zakazyvali?’
Elena comes hurrying.
‘Shto? Steeralnaya mashina?’ She glares at Rachel suspiciously, then takes hold of the little stool that sits by the phone and hauls it over to the door so that she, too, can peer through the spyhole. A stream of Russian invective ensues, mainly from Elena, with one or two muffled words from the madman. The caretaker keeps glancing over her shoulder with a look of increasing fury until Rachel understands that it isn’t the madman she is appalled by so much as Rachel’s own ineptitude in causing him to appear. Then Elena climbs down from the stool with a huffing noise and begins working both locks with fingers like gristly chicken bones.
‘Don’t!’ implores Rachel. It is too late. The door is open and the madman isn’t a madman at all, but a man with a horribly damaged eye, the eyelid so bruised and swollen she cannot see his eyeball. Next to him sits a huge cardboard box that reaches up to his waist. She sees the picture before she forms the words. A square with a circle inside it. A washing machine.
‘Mykola!’ the man says, helplessly, at which point Elena falls silent.
Mykola. Rachel recognises that name, but before her emotions have time to rearrange themselves, the man shrieks and puts his hand up to his face.
Elena has spat at his black eye.
* * *
Rachel knows all about consequences. As a child, these consequences had a physical presence; they bore down upon her like giant transport lorries, loads strapped tight beneath flapping tarpaulin. Her friends didn’t seem to share her fears; she faced this nightmare alone.
When she was six or seven her parents went away. She wasn’t sure where, exactly; to a funeral or on a holiday or perhaps they simply disappeared, walking out of her existence for a week. They left her in the care of some friends, a middle-aged couple with five children of their own, all of them older than Rachel. The family lived in Portsmouth, one street back from the sea, and while the two oldest boys were told not to let Rachel swim out of her depth, other restrictions were few.
The sun was hot the week she stayed there. It must have been the summer holidays, as the narrow beach was teeming with families and every day she and the others were given ten pence for a Ninety-Nine from the ice cream van near the entrance to Billy Manning’s. But the others didn’t spend their money on Ninety-Nines. Instead they ran underneath the Ferris wheel and made a beeline for the long, low shack on the far side of the funfair. The shack was called Tam’s Treasure Trove and when Rachel first stepped underneath the peeling sign she felt swallowed up by its darkness after the glare of the concrete and the bright, sharp shingle. The air smelled like a tidal cave and straight away she fell in love with the buzzes and bleeps, the flashing lights and the grown-ups huddled, intent, over the machines. They took no notice of her.
A sudden jangling crash to her right had made her jump, but the others just laughed and winked at each other.
One of the boys showed her how to hand over her precious ten pence piece to a man with purplish-green tattoos all over his forearms. The man sat up high on a stool in a narrow booth by the door. Neat towers of brown pennies had been lined up along the shelf in front of him, and when Rachel fed her coin under the window he pushed a stack of ten towards her without looking up. The older boy immediately took three of the pennies out of her hand and she followed him towards a long, brightly lit machine with revolving trays of money inside: thousands of pennies she could watch if she pressed her face against the sticky, curving glass.
The boy pushed one of her pennies into a slot. It rolled down a chute and spun on its axis
for a second or two before the tray above it moved forward and knocked it flat. Rachel quickly understood that the penny needed to fall in just the right place, at just the right moment, if it was to be shunted onwards with any chance of toppling on to the tray below and perhaps starting a waterfall of pennies like the one she had witnessed when they first entered. All around her, people were scooping up coins from the dark holes underneath and pushing them back in. The jangling sound made her skin tingle and she wanted it to happen for herself. It wasn’t her lucky day, though. One penny in particular seemed to defy the laws of gravity as it hung lop-sidedly over the edge. She longed to see it fall. It wasn’t fair.
When her money was gone she wandered towards the back of the shack, where the smell of mould and vinegar made her want to pinch her nose and the machines only took five pence pieces. A woman in an orange dress leaned over a tall machine in the corner; it lit up her thin face and made her cheekbones stick out. The woman muttered something, then gripped the central rim with her fingers and rammed her hip against the glass. The machine tipped slightly and released its bonanza with a plashing cascade.
Rachel returned to her machine. She tried copying the woman, and when her child’s weight couldn’t shift it, she gave it a kick. The kick hurt her bare toe and still the coins wouldn’t budge, yet the man in the booth had seen her and he started banging on his window and shouting that he’d call the police. As she fled the arcade, Rachel saw him climbing down from his stool. She didn’t stop running until she got back to the house and though the others didn’t tell on her, she spent the next four days in bed, fear pushing her down into the mattress and under the pillow while she cried about a stomach ache and listened for the policeman’s knock at the front door. When no policemen came, she concluded that they hadn’t known where to find her. They were probably still searching, house to house. Those were the consequences. There is no such thing as an empty threat.
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