by Julia Bell
At the time it seemed weird that I picked her van. Like a good sign. But now I think it was the worst idea I could have had. He must have seen me when I broke open the door, and it would be easy to follow. It got me through the border, but I don’t know if it got me away from him.
The house is so huge and comfortable it’s like a movie-star home from the magazines. The carpets are thick as snow.
I tiptoe even though I know there’s no one to hear me. In the kitchen I open all the drawers. Maybe I could sell some of the knives and forks, or the thick cotton cloths – I could carry those in a bag. Then I find what I am looking for: sticking out of an envelope hidden underneath some folded material. Four twenty-pound notes: eighty pounds. It looks like more money than coins. I stuff it into my back pocket and shut the drawer. Adik will help me find a better job, a proper job, so I can pay it back.
I pull the corner of the postcard with Adik’s address on it out of the padding of my bra. Twisted up like a sweet wrapper. The card was a collage of London with soldiers in red coats and tall fur hats, and grey palaces and a big wheel. Even though I know it off by heart I have to look, to remind myself that it’s real. 88 Lordship Road, Tottenham, London.
The postcard just said – Write me. Adik xx. And the address. I took it with me when I packed, just in case. Tommy said I would get a break in between jobs and, sure, I’d get plenty of opportunity to travel. When he told me this I was so excited. I imagined how surprised Adik would be when I showed up. Hey, it’s me. Guess what? I couldn’t wait. I got a job too.
Now I can’t think of Tommy without his face twisting in my mind. The sneering look he gave me when I started crying and told him I wanted to go home. And I remember Antonio saying I was a stupid girl, that of course Tommy had explained to me what I was supposed to do before he sent me to him in Italy – I just wasn’t listening properly.
I wonder for a second what I will do if Adik isn’t there. But I can’t imagine that. The only thing that is keeping the blood flowing in my body is the thought that he will be there. He will be there to call me Oksana, to remind me who I am.
I grab a few apples and bananas from the bowl in the kitchen. I will get a job. Whatever it is, I don’t care, as long as it’s not sex. I am still strong, I can work kitchens, I can work factories. Anything.
Just when I’m ready to leave, I see the phone on the side by the fridge. Like a white walkie-talkie that policemen use. The idea of phoning home is suddenly so close it makes me feel ill. I could let Father know I am still alive. Tell little Viktor about the million bucks house and the movie-star living room.
When I dial in the numbers nothing happens. Just a flat tone. I try again and get the same. I put it down, disappointed, and stare at the smooth expensive plastic. Maybe I need to dial an operator number first. There is only one phone in our block. At the bottom of the stairs, on the other side from our flat. You have to buy phonecards from the shop to use it. Maybe it’s out of order again.
There’s a phonebook under the table. I flick through the pages but the English looks dense and heavy and I have to concentrate to see words I can read. I make out the word Russia and a code. I dial the code and then our number again and there’s a hiss and a few clicks and then a soft purr. It seems to ring for ever before someone picks up.
‘Hello?’ I don’t recognize the voice.
‘Er, it’s Oksana Droski. I’m phoning for Tolya in flat sixty-three.’
‘Who?’
‘Tolya Droski and Viktor in flat sixty-three.’
‘They moved out,’ she says.
‘Oh.’ My heart is suddenly full of lead. ‘Do you know where? Did they leave an address?’
The woman sighs. ‘Hold on.’
More crackly static, then feet shuffling against concrete, the sound of someone knocking on a door and then voices, but I can’t make out what they’re saying. Moved out? My heart sinks. All this time I imagined Viktor going to school, playing football in the courtyard. And now they’ve gone someplace without me. I feel like I want to throw up. All over the thick carpet and soft sofa and million-bucks house.
‘Hello?’
‘Are you the whore?’
‘What?!’
‘Oksana Droski, Polina and Tolya Droski’s daughter. You ran away to become a whore.’
A hot flush of shame courses through my body. I don’t know what to say. Zergei used to say if I ran away he’d tell everyone back home what I was. ‘Then they won’t talk to you any more.’ But it seems like the secret was already out. My heart freezes over at the thought that Father knows.
‘Mrs Shiroff says they went to Moscow to live with Polina’s sister. I don’t know where.’
‘Oh.’
‘Mrs Shiroff says you never sent any money. Even Mrs Shiroff’s daughter sends money.’
‘I’m not a whore! You don’t even know me!’ I shout. I wonder who it is that told them.
‘We all have a difficult life,’ she says, and hangs up.
I drop the phone as I’m trying to put it back in its cradle. The plastic cracks apart like a nutshell, spilling out guts made of wire and batteries. I bend down to try to put it back together but my hands won’t work properly. Gone to Moscow? Without waiting for me? How long have I been away? I try to count the months, fourteen, perhaps fifteen. I don’t understand. Maybe they thought I was dead. I throw the phone back on the floor and stamp on the pieces.
6
Hope
Everyone in the shop is talking about it. Deborah, the girl on the till, is waving her hands around like she saw it all herself.
‘. . . and the shock of it – all the cups and plates broken into pieces and everything. I mean, what’s the point in that?’
A group of old ladies from the village stands around the till making oohing noises. Like pigeons, I think, as Mum distractedly fills her basket with three packets of digestives.
‘Mum . . .’ I grab her sleeve, ‘you’ve got three . . .’
‘Shhhh.’ She shrugs me off, still listening.
‘. . . well, I think it was drugs, that’s what made them do it.’ Deborah folds her arms over her green Londis apron. ‘People do crazy things. That’s seven ninety-eight, please, love.’
‘Cheddar or Brie?’ Mum picks out a triangle of cheap Brie and turns up her nose at the brand. ‘The selection here is so poor,’ she hisses at me.
‘Whatever,’ I shrug, trying to hide in the bakery aisle and pretend like I’m not with her.
‘Really, Hope, do you have to slouch like that?’ She gives me one of her looks, like she wishes that she had another kind of daughter, the kind who has good posture and holds her knife and fork properly and is polite and makes interesting conversation with her parents.
‘Well, I suppose it doesn’t matter if you’re not the sharpest knife in the drawer. I mean, we can’t all be blessed with the brains of your father,’ she said to me once after I got OK, but less than fantastic, results in my SATs.
‘Are we going to be here all day?’ I ask, turning my nose up at the vegetarian pâté in their new ‘Deli-icious’ range that she has put in her basket.
‘It’s you who wanted lunch.’
The women at the till shuffle out of the way for Mum.
‘I heard about the farm,’ Mum says to them.
And then they’re off, repeating the story again, like we haven’t already heard it twice going round the shop. This time there are new details. Kevin, the farmer’s son, has bad debts they think. Too fond of his poker, might be someone he owes has done him over, for revenge, like. Because it seems strange for an attempted burglary. What’s the point of smashing stuff up before you steal it?
I try to pretend I’m not there. The minutes tick by like hours on the Silk Cut clock behind the till. I worry about Natasha locked in the house. I don’t know why but I am worried about her. I want to get home and check that she’s still there.
Back in the car, Mum seems reassured, but she’s still freaked out that she hasn’t be
en able to get hold of Dad. ‘He’s had his phone on voicemail all day.’ Mum always seems to think that Dad should be there for her, instantly, just when she needs him.
‘Maybe he’s busy,’ I say tiredly.
‘Hmm. He’s always busy in a crisis.’
The moment we get back home I run upstairs, pretending to Mum I need the bathroom. My bedroom is warm like someone has been in it, but she’s not there.
I feel sort of disappointed, then paranoid that she might be somewhere else in the house, where Mum can find her.
Suddenly there’s a crash in the wardrobe that makes me jump, some muffled swearing. Then the doors swing open. Natasha kind of falls out of it with my clothes and all the hangers and a broken clothes rail on top of her.
‘Shit!’
I giggle because it’s funny and I’m nervous. But she doesn’t look very amused.
‘Why do you lock the doors? Natasha couldn’t get out!’ She sits up, throwing my jacket off her head. ‘Now your wardrobe is breaking!’ Then it’s like she sees me laughing and can’t help giggling too. ‘I thought it was your mother.’
She stands up, brushing dust off her clothes and smoothing her hair flat. She half smiles at me, like I’m amusing but annoying, something to be tolerated.
‘Are you, like, in trouble or something?’ I ask her.
She turns away from me and folds her arms. ‘Why you always want to know what I am doing? Why you always asking? Blah blah blah, all the time. I don’t want to talk about it! Always talking! If I want to do talking then I tell you! Anyways, I have to go. Now.’
She gets up and bounces like she needs a pee. I can hear Mum in the kitchen, rattling cups in the sink. She’ll want me downstairs soon.
‘You’ll have to wait.’ I try to explain to her that if Mum sees her she’ll call the police, but she just hears the word ‘police’ and her eyes widen.
‘No policija! No police!’
‘It’s OK. It’s OK. There’s no police here. Promise. Wait until I go downstairs, and then you can go. Out the front, OK, and don’t go past the kitchen or Mum will see you.’
She grabs my hand and says thank you and then lots of things in a weird language that I don’t understand, which sounds like maybe it could be Russian. All I can think is how cold and bony her fingers are, and how tightly she’s holding on to me, and I don’t know why, but I don’t want her to leave.
An idea blooms in my mind, a plan. It comes so fully formed, that I know it must be the right thing to do.
‘If we leave really early I can be there and back in a day. And I’ll leave a note so Mum won’t call the police. It won’t take long to find Tottenham on the map. Not once we’re in London. And I’ve still got money left over from Christmas, in my account maybe a hundred pounds, enough to get us there. I’ll take you. I’ll show you!’
Natasha closes one eye and kind of squints at me. ‘You coming with me? To Tottenham?’
I nod. It’s not like I’ve got anything else planned. And then I can tell Amanda I went to London, never mind about her missing a night out on Thursday for a stupid date.
She laughs. ‘You want to come with me?!’ Then she shrugs. ‘OK. If you want.’
I tell Natasha my plan. She will go downstairs and out the front door while I distract Mum, and then she’ll have to hide in the summer house until it gets dark. When Mum is asleep, I’ll join her and we’ll get the really early bus to Norwich, the one that goes at six from the bus stop at the end of the lane.
When I walk into the kitchen I am weak with nerves. My senses are so intense I’m sure I can feel even the slightest breath of air against my skin. Mum’s bustling. Cleaning surfaces, clattering plates.
‘Your father thinks it’s nothing to worry about.’ She sounds cross about this.
‘Oh.’
‘You know, Hope, when you find a man, make sure he’s someone you can share your life with.’ She scrubs a scouring pad round the sink; the scratch of metal makes my teeth hurt. I never thought she could see me with a man before; that’s new.
‘Are you going to split up with Dad again?’
Before she had me, Mum had a job with an insurance company, her own office, a secretary. Then Dad got rich and suddenly there was no need to go back to work.
She turns to me and puts her hands on her hips. ‘How would it be if we moved into the city for a while, just you and me?’
‘Um . . .’ I can hear a creak on the stairs, Natasha’s shadow passes across the door to the hallway. ‘Yeah, cool.’
Mum says this every time she’s in a mood with Dad, but when it comes to the moment, she can never leave. She got as far as the front door once, suitcases packed, me in my coat with a rucksack, but when she got to the door she started crying. ‘I just couldn’t do it. I looked at that umbrella rack, the antique one we got for a wedding present, and I couldn’t bear the thought of leaving.’
‘You know, we could get a little house in Norwich or something if I can force your father to sell this place.’
The latch on the front door clicks softly, too soft for Mum to hear, and Natasha’s out of reach.
‘It’s typical of him to abandon us in a crisis. I need him to come home tonight, after everything that’s happened today.’
She goes on like this until she runs out of words and then she changes the subject. ‘Darling? Have you seen the downstairs phone? It seems to have disappeared.’
I wait half an hour after Mum’s gone to bed, watching out of the bedroom window with the lights turned off. In the moonlight, the summer house looks like a face: the shuttered windows half-closed eyes, the circular decking a gaping, toothy grin. I blink, to make the image go away. I hope Natasha’s still out there.
Snuggling into my coat I check my room, in case I’ve forgotten something important. I’ve got my bank card, a map of London, my phone. I pick up a strawberry lipsalve and a pound coin and put them in my pocket. Twelve fifteen. Another ten minutes and I’ll go outside. As I watch, I’m sure I can hear a low grumbling in the lane, the crunch of feet on gravel. I open the window wider to try and hear. Think maybe it’s Dad, coming home early after all Mum’s phone calls. But the air is silent, thick and damp from the heat. Nothing.
A shape appears, escaping from the side of the summer house, no more than a shadow, disappearing into the bushes with a soft crackle of greenery. Natasha. She’s heading towards the hedge – the only place she can go from there is into the cornfield.
My hands fumble as I unlock the back door. I can’t do it quick enough. I run through what this might mean, feeling stupid, betrayed.
‘Natasha?’ The undergrowth nearby rustles. I step off the path into the borders, my feet sinking into the soft piles of mulch Mum heaps around the plants. She’ll go mad if I tread on anything, but I can’t think about that now. The rustling backs away from me towards the hedge.
‘Natasha? What’s going on?’
‘Shhhhhh.’ A hand grabs me and pulls me back towards the fence into a noisy thicket of bamboo. She puts a sticky hand across my mouth. ‘Shhhh, please.’
I crouch down beside her and hold my breath, the garden is suddenly loud with sound. Something rustles in the bushes – a rat, a mouse, maybe even a rabbit, scrabbling about in the undergrowth by the greenhouse; our bodies tremble in the grass.
‘He’s here,’ she whispers.
‘Who?’
She doesn’t answer, but when I look at her, her eyes are wide and wild again.
He seems to come from nowhere. Suddenly, there’s this man standing in front of us and he seems much bigger and taller than he did on the ferry.
7
Hope
It’s hard to know what happens next. I am aware of being pulled up by the arm, and Natasha screaming and trying to run away, but he’s got her too, held off the ground, arm round her neck. I kick, but my feet are only scuffing the top of the grass, and the body that’s carrying me grunts as he crosses the lawn.
For a moment I am too stunned to react
. Where did he come from? How come I didn’t see him? Then I scream, call out for Mum, loud enough to make him shake me.
‘Shut up!’ he says, voice dark, foreign. ‘Stupid girls.’
And then we’re in the lane, next to a dark Lexus with blacked-out windows. He drops me so he can open the boot, and I know I should run, but it takes ages for the thought to reach through the panic to my legs, and by the time my muscles have reacted, he’s got hold of me again.
‘Get in,’ he says, pointing at the dark space of the boot. Natasha obediently bows her head and clambers inside, curling up her body to fit herself in the space.
‘No way!’ I struggle against him, but he’s solid, muscled, like a bodybuilder. He tightens his grip on my arm, squashing muscle against bone. ‘You’re hurting me!’
If I can stall him long enough maybe Mum will hear me screaming. I manage a kick against his knees that makes him yelp and buckle for a second, but he doesn’t let go, and suddenly I’m lifted and tossed into the boot of the car like I’m a doll. I land heavily, half on my elbow, half on top of Natasha. He grabs my bag off my shoulder then he shuts the lid with a slam, plunging us into total darkness.
I can hear someone screaming and it takes a moment to realize that it’s me. Natasha wriggles to get her legs out from underneath me. I go to sit up, but my forehead collides with metal.
Natasha’s pulls me down next to her so I’m lying on my side.
‘Lie down,’ she says. ‘It’s easier.’
‘Easier?’
And then he starts the car.
The roar of the engine is close and deafening and as the car shoots forward we’re bounced up and down over every pothole in the lane.
‘Let me out!’ I shout so loud my throat hurts. ‘Let me out!’
‘Shhhhhh.’ Natasha puts a hand across my mouth, her skin is clammy and smells metallic, like she’s been holding money. ‘Do you want him to tie you up and gag you?’
The car slows and turns, and then I know we’re out on the road, the engine is smoother, faster, the road close underneath us. Already it’s starting to get hot and it stinks of petrol.