One afternoon, as Rachel is watching a man buy raspberries from a fruit stall on Khreschatyk, Teddy spies her from across the street. He runs over to her, dodging a truck with flapping tarpaulin sides. It beeps its horn and makes Ivan shriek.
‘Hey,’ he says, planting a kiss on her temple. ‘Raspberries! The first of the season. I want some.’
‘Do you think they’re safe to eat?’ asks Rachel, who knows that if she asks the stallholder he will swear they’ve been grown in the Caucasus.
Teddy smiles. ‘I hope so. I’ve given up worrying.’ He glances at Ivan. ‘Seriously, it’s too early in the season for them to have come from the exclusion zone. Don’t they smell fabulous?’
They both pause for a moment, waiting as the man at the front of the queue refuses the little newspaper cones offered by the stallholder and instead opens up his peeling vinyl briefcase so that she can heap the soft fruit inside.
‘I should have brought a bag,’ says Teddy. ‘Those cones are going to leak.’
Rachel pulls a pastel blue nappy sack out of her handbag. ‘Would you like one of these? They’re quite hygienic. I use them all the time.’
‘Rachel,’ exclaims Teddy, ‘you are beautiful and resourceful! We must have raspberries with ice cream. And meringue – Karl loves a Pavlova. I’m going to tell Vee that’s what I want at my leaving dinner. Not cherry dumplings. Dumplings are for winter.’
Rachel feels a little unsteady on her feet. She grips the handles of the pushchair.
‘Are you leaving?’
Teddy looks down at her, surprised. ‘Didn’t Lucas tell you? That boy is something else! Well, I’m off to Bosnia with Karl. New adventures! Hey, don’t look so sad! We’re having a last supper at Vee’s. Next Saturday. You better come – I refuse to sit next to anyone else!’
‘Dinner is difficult . . .’ murmurs Rachel. ‘With Ivan – now he’s older it’s harder to take him out at night.’
‘So let’s find you a babysitter,’ says Teddy. ‘How about that caretaker – the one who’s retired with a suitcase of cash. She’s fond of Ivan, right?’ He smiles, rueful, sympathetic. ‘Lucas needs to show you off.’
‘Lucas wants me to go back to London.’ The words rush out of Rachel before she can stop them; for a moment she doesn’t recognise the woman discussing her husband with a man she barely knows. But this is Teddy, she reminds herself. Not Mykola.
Teddy rubs his chin.
‘Then please come for my sake, and yours.’
* * *
Rachel thinks about Teddy’s suggestion as the trolleybus rattles up the broad boulevard of Lesi Ukrainky. She doesn’t want to leave Ivan with someone else, but neither does she want Lucas to visit Vee’s flat without her. Teddy knows something; he’s just too loyal to pass it on.
As she pushes Ivan across the waste ground she spies Stepan. He is lounging in the grass; she can just see his shorn head and shoulders through the tangle of stems and weeds. He is with that horrible man, his minder. That they are outside is not, Rachel reminds herself, so unusual. These days she often encounters bodies sprawled in the sunshine. Sometimes she passes lovers grappling silently, like molluscs, or she steers the pushchair round a pair of mottled legs sticking out across the path. Old men slump on the benches and chat softly or stare down at their hands. Young girls with their skinny arms and bright hair accessories sit cross-legged and play clapping games or chalk neat rows of sums on the concrete, and several times she has seen the same middle-aged couple enjoying a picnic of gherkins and sausage laid out on a blue handbag amongst the dandelions.
She could skirt around Stepan. She could remain out of sight, but she has things she wants to ask him and it is better to do it here, out in the open, than down in the basement or in the shadows on the stairs.
As she approaches, she wonders what the pair are looking at, for Stepan’s shorn scalp and the older man’s bulging neck both bend towards the ground. She is almost upon them when she sees the chick. It is golden brown and fluffy and it makes little cheeping sounds as it shuttles between them in the space they have flattened out in the grass. Yet what strikes her most is not the chick itself, but the way the two of them use their bodies to fence in the tiny bird. Stepan makes a wall with his legs, while the older man is squatting like a broody, dishevelled hen.
‘Ciao!’ says Stepan, raising his head. ‘Cik cik!’
‘Hello,’ says Rachel. She is facing the sun and puts her hand up to protect her eyes.
‘You want to look?’ he asks. ‘Show your baby?’
Rachel glances down at Ivan, who is nodding off in the shade of the pushchair’s canopy. ‘He’s sleeping . . .’
The older man doesn’t acknowledge her. He is wearing a grey vest and a pair of shiny tracksuit bottoms. The flesh below his jaw sags and glistens. He mutters a few words, then puts his hand to the ground, palm up. The chick obligingly steps on to it.
Rachel grips the pushchair handles. She hasn’t spoken to Stepan for weeks – not since she found him in the basement eating the Angel Delight her mother had sent. She wants to make sure he hasn’t stolen anything else, but her courage is quickly fading.
‘Have you seen Elena today?’ she asks.
Stepan shrugs.
‘Well, if you do see her, will you please tell her I need to talk to her?’ Rachel hopes the boy thinks she is going to tell Elena about the intercepted parcels. Stepan breaks off a stalk of grass and sticks it in his mouth; he looks like a drawing she once saw of Huckleberry Finn.
‘Okay Mum. You want baby-sit?’
Rachel frowns. He must have spoken to Teddy. She hates the way he knows what she wants. Before she can contradict him, however, the older man lifts his hand off the ground and curls his fingers around the chick.
‘Don’t!’ says Rachel, stepping forward, imagining the crushing of its tiny breast and bones.
Stepan’s companion takes no notice. Carefully, gently, he places the chick behind him in the long grass and lets it topple off his hand.
‘Cik cik!’ repeats Stepan as the chick shakes itself off and scoots out of sight.
Now Rachel wants Stepan to go after the chick and rescue it, because she knows it won’t survive alone in the killing fields of the waste ground with its starving strays and sharp-beaked crows. But Stepan doesn’t move.
‘I’ve been meaning to ask you,’ she says, trying to sound self-assured. ‘Why did you open that parcel addressed to me – with the packets of pudding mix? Have you opened other parcels, too? I don’t understand why you would do that.’
Stepan sticks his tongue between his bottom lip and his teeth.
‘Someone tell me to,’ he says.
This is not what Rachel is expecting.
‘Who? Who told you?’
‘I don’t say,’ says Stepan. ‘Not someone. I make it up, like story.’
Don’t lie, thinks Rachel. She is still distracted by the lost chick, still looking for movement in the weeds behind him. ‘Was it someone called Mykola?’
Stepan shrugs. ‘No one!’
‘Him?’ she presses, nodding at the older man. ‘Did he make you? What else have you stolen?’
For the first time Stepan looks surprised.
‘Not stolen, Mum. I looking.’
Rachel feels the heat spreading across her neck. ‘Don’t call me “Mum”.’
‘Okay,’ says Stepan. ‘Queen Mum. Mrs Mum. Not you. You not Mum. I tell Elena Vasilyevna you want baby-sit.’
Sensing she is being dismissed, Rachel stares, exasperated, as Stepan lies back in the long grass and drapes his arm across his face. The older man grunts and rolls on to his side.
It isn’t until she regains the path that she sees a small thing skitter through the grass towards the dump bins and hears its plaintive cheep.
* * *
Elena is walking up the hill to the univers
am when she notices the car slowing to a crawl beside her. She doesn’t turn to look; rather, she does her utmost to ignore it. It is a foreign car – silver, with a long sloping bonnet and windows you can’t see through. A gangster car.
Elena isn’t feeling so well today. Her hips ache and now her stomach is upset. She doesn’t want to be out for too long in case her bowels loosen. It’s the new flat, she tells herself, with its strange echoes and hard floors. She keeps the windows open despite the flies, because she knows how the vents work in these apartment blocks and she doesn’t want to breathe in air that has incubated its germs in the lungs of a stranger.
The lights are green at the busy intersection, but the silver car doesn’t accelerate. Instead it continues to creep forward beside Elena, keeping pace with her slow shuffle, holding up the traffic behind so that other drivers lean on their horns. When the lights turn red it doesn’t brake, staying abreast of the pedestrians as they flow across the street.
Elena keeps walking. She needs oil and scouring powder, and may perhaps buy a bag of bread rings for the little boy, but the afternoon is warm and her feet feel swollen and heavy. She turns right down a side street and the car glides right too, hugging the curb, nosing level with her legs.
Now she is beginning to feel breathless. The city is full of fumes and each day the walk to the universam gets a little harder. She stops for a moment and steadies herself beneath a plane tree. The car stops moving, too. The passenger window slides down with a soft electric hum, though because of the shadow cast by the tree she cannot see who sits inside. It doesn’t matter. She never sees, never looks. She bends down as if she is about to pluck a weed out of the soil, but instead she scoops up something in her hand and quickly, awkwardly, throws it into the car: a dog turd, not as fresh as she would like, yet still stinking.
* * *
On Saturday night, when Elena taps at the door of the flat on the thirteenth floor, Rachel is having second thoughts about going to Vee’s without Ivan. She arranged the time with Elena the day before, holding up seven fingers and repeating ‘syem!’ but now she has more or less decided to send her away. However, as she opens the door Elena thrusts a small carton of peach juice at her and slips quickly inside, divesting herself of her thick cardigan and shoes. The old woman smiles and shuffles down the hallway as if she is the housekeeper or Ivan’s elderly godmother.
‘Ivan is sleeping,’ whispers Rachel, cutting Elena off at the kitchen, miming and pointing to the closed bedroom door. Lucas is in the bathroom so she switches on the television, keeping the volume low. Elena nods and sits down at the table while Rachel, unsure what to do next, sets the kettle on the hob and puts biscuits on a plate. Ivan won’t wake, she reminds herself. He’s become a deep sleeper like his father.
When Lucas appears she asks him to explain that they will be back at ten-thirty and if anything is wrong she must call Vee’s number, which is written down on a sheet of paper next to the telephone.
‘Ten thirty?’ mutters Lucas. ‘This is Teddy’s leaving dinner! Well, I suppose Zoya can bring you back earlier.’
Rachel doesn’t risk a last peek at her son. She closes the front door softly behind her.
‘Hurry up,’ says Lucas, stabbing at the button of the lift. ‘I don’t want to be late.’
* * *
Rachel stands in the hallway of Vee’s flat and stares at the homemade bunting that hangs along the wall. Each triangle is cut from a photograph of Teddy or Karl, or both. In all the pictures they are laughing, sometimes with Vee, sometimes posing with other people, sometimes caught unawares. These are snapshots of lives that are busy and sociable; lives that mean something.
‘Look, here’s a picture with you in it,’ says Vee, pointing at a dark image. It is a little out of focus and shows Rachel with her eyes half shut sitting next to Karl and Teddy on the bed at Lucas’s birthday party.
‘It’s a nice idea,’ murmurs Rachel, as she glances along the row and sees a picture of Lucas, smiling through a cloud of cigarette smoke, one arm around Teddy, the other round Vee. What was it Lucas told her they used to call themselves? The Troika.
Rachel, having assumed the dress code for the night would be ‘expensively understated’, is wearing the jeans she bought with her credit card and a pale blue shirt she has carefully ironed. Tonight, however, Vee is wearing a low-cut dress made from some silky, stretchy material that clings to her hips and shows off the creamy lustre of her breasts. Lucas keeps glancing towards her as he chats to Karl beneath a triangle of Vee and Teddy pouting at the camera.
Vee has dragged her kitchen table through to the bed-sitting room. Rachel looks in and sees candles and linen napkins and counts places laid for eight. The doorbell rings. Vee’s other guests have arrived, and Rachel is surprised to find she recognises all three of them: Sorin, Dr Alleyn from the embassy, and Viktor Lukyanenko, the young film director, who pulls Vee close and kisses her on the mouth.
* * *
Vee serves black caviar with the bottle of proper champagne that Sorin has presented to her. Rachel, squeezed between Teddy and Dr Alleyn, isn’t feeling very hungry. She needn’t have come, she thinks. Vee has moved on to someone else. Her husband, sitting opposite her between Karl and Lukyanenko, looks wary in the glow of the candlelight. For a moment she pities him.
‘Our hostess is spoiling us!’ stage-whispers Teddy, as he scoops up a spoonful of the sticky beluga eggs and smears them across a freshly-made buckwheat blini.
‘Ah, but I have a friendly supplier who gives me a discount,’ laughs Vee.
Dr Alleyn raises an eyebrow. ‘Of course you do,’ he says, to no one in particular.
‘Well, I should like to raise a toast to these intrepid adventurers – Teddy and Karl!’ says Sorin from the end of the table, waving his glass.
‘To Teddy and Karl!’ repeat the others. ‘Nazdarovye!’
The main course is a platter of fresh perch along with baby potatoes and herb butter. Wine and vodka appear, and before long the table has divided into separate conversations all happening at once. Dr Alleyn talks to Sorin about isotopes and river contamination. Teddy tells Rachel about Bosnia, and how he and Karl hope to get into Sarajevo, despite the fact that it is under continual bombardment.
‘There’s a tunnel,’ Teddy says. ‘From UN-controlled territory right into the city. Paid for with cigarettes, I heard.’
‘But it’s too dangerous, surely?’ asks Rachel, as she picks through the fish on her plate. She thinks of the mortar bombs and the weeping women and skeletal men she has seen on the news.
‘Maybe,’ says Teddy, serious for a moment. ‘But I’d rather take my chances there than get my head smashed in by some queer-basher down by the Dnieper.’
Rachel is shocked. ‘Has something happened?’ she asks.
‘No,’ says Teddy, though his glance over to Karl makes her wonder. Karl is quiet tonight, which isn’t unusual, but now she sees how one side of his face is slightly yellow. He seems to be holding himself in, his left arm crossed over his chest. She draws a deep breath, ready to probe further.
‘Shh,’ whispers Teddy, watching her carefully, holding a finger to his lips. ‘Out of the frame, remember?’
Lucas seems to be getting into a discussion with Vee and Lukyanenko about the film industry and the progress of his feature. Lukyanenko is talking about financing, his face serious, his tone sombre, yet he is holding Vee’s hand and they are pushing against each other’s thumbs, each bending the other’s back with real force. Suddenly Lukyanenko’s thumb gives way and he laughs.
‘What’s funny?’ asks Lucas, clearly unsettled.
Lukyanenko sits back; he is now caressing Vee’s fingers. He isn’t the kind of man Rachel expects Vee to choose as a partner. His face is too pointed, his head too small; but his expression is intense, and Rachel finds herself staring.
‘Everything is funny,’ he says, looking round
the table. ‘I am here, eating dinner, sitting next to my – ah, that phrase – “whip-ass” girlfriend. Yet my movie is very far from secure. Everything is paid for – wages, post-production, PR -’ he nods at Sorin – ‘yet I depend on the . . . protection of my backers to ensure the film is released and is shown in our cinemas. Now I have a problem. Someone is making threats.’
‘Who?’ asks Lucas quickly.
Vee leans back and studies Lucas from behind Lukyanenko’s head. ‘See there’s the real story, Lucas. Haven’t I always said so? It’s not the production you should be interested in, but the money flow, the gate-keepers . . . I know a guy with a white goods store. Nothing too fancy – take a look at his sort if you want to dig deep. He’s connected, all the way. Not even Sorin here can touch him!’
Sorin is grinning, uncomfortable, but Lucas looks horrified. ‘The film will be distributed, won’t it? On general release? The premiere—’
Lukyanenko turns to him and now there is no trace of irony. ‘I want you to have your story,’ he says. ‘Good for you, good for my movie, good for our industry. You will come to the premiere, I think, and I hope you bring your wife, though maybe not your little boy, whose performance I remember at the sound stage!’
‘Oh God!’ Vee laughs, offering cigarettes around the table. ‘The kid’s adorable, but what a responsibility! Rachel has managed amazingly with him here.’ Her eyes fix on Rachel in the candlelight. ‘Gotta love him, but it’s great you found a babysitter. It must be quite a deal, leaving him for the first time.’ She raises her glass, still holding Rachel’s stare. ‘Now it’s my turn to make a toast. To all moms. To Rachel!’
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