What the Light Reveals

by Mick McCoy

  She was barefoot, as was her habit after a few glasses of wine. Out on the step with the smell of her flock, their snores and mumbles and rustles, it felt like home. She slid the soles of her feet back and forth across the rippling run of the lower wooden step, its time-worn roughness massaging her soles.

  The dog barked again. Not at her chickens this time, but at the headlights of a car approaching from the Bridge Road end of the lane, from where vehicles rarely came. The dog growled as tyres drummed at the cobbles, until the dry screech of brake shoes and the ratcheting lift of a handbrake lever silenced them both. Headlights cut slithers of light through the occasional narrow gaps in the Murphys’ fence palings and the sleeping chooks in the roost began to wake, pecking uneasily at the air.

  Car doors swung open and boot heels landed in the bluestone, stopping at the Murphys’ narrow back gate just as Conrad arrived in the laundry, his arms loaded with boxes of empties. The lane dog’s high-pitched yelp and paw-scrabbling retreat made him gaze out into the night.

  ‘Who’s there?’ Ruby called.

  Boots paced the laneway along the length of their back fence, something unforgiving being dragged across the palings with a two-note percussion that brought the full house of hens straight from drowsy wonder to high panic. The headlights were switched off, leaving Conrad, Ruby and the hens lit only by the stars and the dim light washing through the Murphys’ back door. The abrasive clatter at the fence was unabated.

  Conrad flicked the switch for the outside light, which only caused further havoc in the chook house. Through the wire front wall Ruby could see her hens piling into the back corners, birds scrambling and feathers flying as they squawked and pecked and trampled away from the racket at the back fence and the harsh light shining from the house.

  Ruby stepped into the middle of the yard. ‘What do you want?’ she shouted.

  Conrad grabbed a long-necked beer bottle. The rear wall of the chook house rattled and thundered under the clubbing from the lane, the hens becoming more disoriented and panicked, frenzied claws tearing at each other’s bloodied flanks as they darted blindly one way and the other and flew from their roosts.

  Ruby heard laughter as the intruders stopped at the gate, whacking it with their cudgels.

  ‘Take off,’ Conrad said. ‘Just get back in your car and take off.’

  But the rapping grew faster and heavier, and the palings began to splinter. Conrad lifted the bottle and held it in front of him a moment, before swinging it underarm and releasing it high over the gate and out to the lane. It grazed the lane’s far fence before smashing on the cobbles. The beating on the gate stopped for a breath then resumed, but the laughter was gone. Ruby reached into the box and grabbed another bottle, lofting it higher into the night sky as it sailed over the fence. It crashed directly onto the paving stones, but not before she’d bent for a third bottle and thrown it with the same hostility. Conrad started on the other box as they hurled long-necked beer and wine bottles over the fence like grenades from a trench. One after the other bottles were flung high to rain from the sky into the laneway, crashing like an orchestra of glass cymbals.

  A man’s face appeared in the patch of light that shone through the fist-sized hole for the gate’s latch. Ruby hurled a bottle at it, missing by a foot, but close enough to provoke a retreat.

  ‘Piss off!’ she said. ‘Or I’ll stick the crooked end of one of these in your neck.’

  A torchlight appeared above the fence from the far side of the lane. ‘What’s going on? I’ve called the police.’

  The back door of their neighbour’s house swung open and Ted Bergstrom called out. ‘Ruby? Conrad? Are you all right?’

  Out in the laneway an engine started and the car picked its way over jagged bottle ends before barrelling down the cobblestones to the south. Conrad opened the gate and leaned into the darkness, Ruby pressing around him in time to see the tail-lights turn into the street thirty yards distant.

  She stood in the lane, barefoot, a bottle neck clenched in her hand. Conrad wrapped an arm around her shoulders. Their neighbour joined them.

  ‘Careful, Ted,’ Conrad said. ‘Glass.’

  ‘Not your party guests?’

  Ruby could feel Conrad’s heart thudding full and fast, his breath deep and rapid in time with her own. ‘No.’

  ‘You two are bloody trouble,’ the torchbearer said over the opposite fence. ‘Nothing but trouble.’

  ‘Pull your head in,’ Ted said, picking his way through the shards. ‘Go back to bed.’

  The torchlight slid from view and the lane returned to darkness. ‘The police are coming, remember,’ came an unseen voice. ‘Explain it to them.’

  Ted shook his head. ‘Do you need any help cleaning up?’

  ‘No,’ Conrad said. ‘Best you make yourself scarce in case he really has called the coppers.’

  ‘All right then.’ He chuckled as he tiptoed to his back gate. ‘But the old coot is right, you lot are trouble.’

  ‘My chooks!’ Ruby said, with a start.

  CONRAD

  By the time Conrad had picked his way through the glass and back inside the yard, Ruby was sitting on the dirt floor of the hutch crying. She cradled a limp, blood-streaked bird, its neck and head sagging across her forearm, while others skittered and flapped about her.

  ‘You’re right, Connie.’ She looked up at his creased brow. ‘This place doesn’t deserve us.’

  Light from the bulb above the back door was cut into diamonds by the wire walls of the chook house. The soles of Ruby’s feet were dark with blood.

  ‘Ruby,’ Conrad said, ‘you’ve cut your feet.’

  ‘Have I?’

  ‘Don’t move.’

  At the back door a small face peered out. Alex raised his arms and Conrad gathered him up. ‘Why are you out of bed?’

  Alex stared up at the sky, his eyes wide and searching.

  Conrad followed his son’s gaze. ‘What can you see?’

  ‘I heard fireworks,’ he said. ‘Has there been fireworks?’

  ‘I’d have come to get you if there were,’ Conrad said. He carried Alex up the stairs.

  ‘Has Mummy got angry with the chickens again?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘There’s a dead one,’ he said. ‘There’s blood.’

  Ruby was still in the dirt.

  ‘Some of the chickens had a fight and Mummy is cleaning them up.’

  ‘She doesn’t like it when there’s fighting,’ Alex said. ‘But she’s good at it.’

  ‘What? Cleaning up?’

  ‘No,’ Alex said. ‘Fighting.’

  REVOLUTION DAY

  RUBY

  She woke with Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev’s face just inches away, his close-set eyes small and red and fierce, fixing her in his sights murderously, deliberately, like she was prey. In a sudden breathless cleft between sleep and wakefulness, in darkness, eyes wide, mouth open, she listened for the rumbling of the tanks, the gravel-crunch of soldiers’ boots, the whispered metallic click of rifles being readied to fire. Nothing. She waited for her heart to settle. Breath by breath she let go.

  Brezhnev, the prick. If anyone needed convincing of the logic and truth of evolution or that the whole God-createdman-in-His-own-image idea was plain bullshit, the Soviet premier, more simian than any chimp, was living proof. As for the contents of his mind or the richness of his soul, the average chimp was far more evolved.

  He haunted her sleep because the 7 November Revolution Day parade would be held in Red Square later that day. Brezhnev would be there. So would she and Conrad.

  In more than thirteen years of living in Moscow they’d never gone, never even considered it, usually escaping for the mid-semester week of school holidays. Every year it was so bitterly cold and the parade so achingly tedious that even the locals stayed home, or went to work, or got out of town. But this year Conrad had received a formal invitation from the Party Central Committee so he insisted they stand alongside the other invite
d patriots in celebration of the Great Socialist Revolution, to witness the glory of socialism in all its militaristic might. He said he didn’t want to go, but couldn’t decline that invitation and then accept a second one from the same Party hacks to have the Badge of Honour pinned to his lapel the same night. Ruby didn’t believe him, entirely.

  So the patriot, his chest a phlegmy mess, and his scowling, tight-lipped wife would be in Red Square later that morning. If they weren’t, their absence would be noted. She agreed with Conrad about that. They would have to stand for hours as dumb as farm animals in the swirling sleet at the foot of Lenin’s tomb, while Brezhnev looked down on them with the demented smile of an organ grinder’s monkey.

  It was still only quarter to six and the cold air was sharp enough to pierce the concrete walls of the apartment block and seep into the bedroom, attaching itself damply to the underweight bedclothes and biting at exposed skin. Ruby rolled onto her side to face Conrad, still asleep. With the pads of her fingers she felt her way across his skull, his hair twisted and pushed around, before withdrawing sharply as he began to hack his way through another round of convulsions. She wondered whether he was telling her everything about his worsening health. The chronic coughing, the foul-smelling brown mucous, the wheezing and the lack of energy. Despite all the spluttering he managed to stay asleep, the cough slowly dissipating into broken pops and crackles, his lips unconsciously pressed together. She lifted her head from the pillow to peer across the darkened room to where his packet of Salems lay open on the bedside table. It wasn’t the cigarettes she blamed for his health, although they didn’t help. It was the bedroom, the flat, the block, the street and every other street and workplace and shop and stranger in the cold city outside. Every queue for bread and meat and sugar and tea and toilet paper, and every empty store shelf. Every broken heater, every gap between glass and window frame. Every pair of eyes, concealed or candid, that watched them. And his naive, pig-headed, blind attachment to it all. That’s what made him sick. What made all of them sick. It wasn’t being there she blamed him for, it was staying.

  Their bedroom was ten feet by ten, with a double bed, two side tables, a rosewood wardrobe and a chest of drawers, on top of which sat a cherry-framed oval cheval mirror. A framed photograph sat either side of the mirror, Peter and Alex in one, standing in front of the flats in lightly falling snow like a pair of itinerant snowmen in greatcoats, tall boots and fur hats. The other showed Peter sitting on the kitchen table, a lifetime ago back in Type Street, wearing a nappy and an inquisitive smile, surrounded by wooden blocks and heat and the remains of a well-eaten family lunch. No pictures hung on the bedroom walls, which were adorned only with paper that peeled at the edges. The floor was covered with linoleum which stretched throughout the flat, except for the bathroom, and the ceiling was low enough that Conrad could reach up and touch it with his fingertips – or he could once, before his chest drew him lower.

  A blind on a roller covered the bedroom window, one of three windows in the flat; the others were in the living room and the kitchen alcove. Cheese and sausage wrapped in a burlap sack hung outside the kitchen window, strung from the latch, for refrigeration. Across the street identical rows of windows boasted the same view as theirs: banks of dustbins outside the opposite block.

  In the living room, two armchairs, a sideboard and a red plush three-seat couch lightened the gloom. The couch wore two cushions dressed in covers Ruby had once crocheted in an effort at homeliness, while a black, plastic-coated wire magazine tidy, holding copies of Moscow News and Novy Mir – for which Ruby did copyediting – stood by one arm. A coffee table sat between it and a television set Alex and Peter stared at faithfully, torturing themselves with programs on crop production, labour heroes and two-hour poetry readings, as if they were payment for the occasional (terribly dubbed and edited) films. This week of school holidays The Jungle Book was treated lightly by the censors, but Cool Hand Luke became a piece of socialist propaganda. Still, the boys lapped up any Western culture, regardless of how bastardised it was.

  The dark early morning drizzled outside her window, enough to mix the snow and ice and dirt on the streets to a crusty slush and make walking anywhere a nightmare if you were unfortunate enough to have to go out in it. Which reminded Ruby about the milk.

  She pushed herself up onto her elbows and leaned into the middle of the bed. Conrad snored. She touched her lips to his forehead, twisted herself out of bed and let her feet land lightly on the rug, a Romanian kilim she’d bought the previous week, second-hand from the Commission Store. Her feet reassured her that with winter’s early arrival it had been a wise purchase. She closed her eyes. The rug’s interwoven woollen knots and whorls could’ve been a narrow strip of warm sandy beach sweeping out from beneath the bed towards the wide sea of linoleum. She slid her feet left and right across the rug then reversed them under the bed, feeling around for her slippers, before making her way out to the living room.

  In the gloom she felt for the light switch and half opened the boys’ bedroom door. It smelt of teenagers. ‘Alex,’ she said, ‘are you awake? You need to get the milk.’

  ALEX

  A wedge of light sliced through the door into the bedroom’s darkness, picking out Alex’s narrow bed and the khaki-painted wall at its head, a quartet of Rolling Stone magazine front pages taped by their corners, showing Paul McCartney and Little Richard, a pink-lipped Mick Jagger and Janis Joplin with feathers in her hair. He’d bartered them from university friends in exchange for packets of Marlboros Valentin had sourced. The light shone directly on his face, while Peter’s bed remained unlit. But all Alex saw was the pink-hued inside of his closed eyelids as they absorbed the light his mother let shine through the door.

  ‘It’s not my turn,’ he said, rolling over.

  ‘Don’t make me come in there.’

  He pulled the blankets higher around his shoulders as cold air leaked in, diluting his and Peter’s exhalations which had been trapped in the unventilated, windowless bedroom.

  ‘The truck will be gone unless you leave now.’

  ‘All right.’ His kept his eyes shut.

  Ruby remained at the door. ‘Alex.’

  ‘All right, I said!’ He slapped a hand against the bedside table, knocking his wristwatch to the floor. ‘I’m coming!’ He kicked at the blankets until his feet found a way out. ‘It’s cold.’ He scooped a pile of clothes from the floor and fished around for the fallen watch, stumbling into Peter’s mattress. ‘Sorry, Pete,’ he said, intentionally unconvincing.

  The younger boy swatted blindly at him. ‘Is the heater broken again?’

  ‘I’ll get Mr Leskov to come today, if I can,’ Ruby said. As Alex slid by her she gave him a shove. ‘But you’ll need to be up soon too,’ she said to Peter. ‘I want you to read to me.’

  Peter groaned.

  ‘C’mon, Golden Boy, it’s not that cold,’ Alex called as he passed through the living room.

  Ruby frowned. ‘You know I don’t like that name.’

  ‘So treat us the same.’

  ‘Don’t start with me, Alex, not today.’

  ‘You’re in control, Mum, like always.’

  In the bathroom he splashed water on his face, blinking himself awake. His eyes were pale blue; a discoloured scar high on his right cheek made it seem like he’d cried a blood-red tear. His thin lips and high forehead could have been Conrad’s, his cheekbones so pronounced his face always looked gaunt. He was very nearly as tall as his father, but with broader shoulders over his narrow chest.

  His reflection stared back sympathetically from among the brown spots pitting the silver backing of the mirror. He slid out of his pyjamas and snatched his clothes from the tiled floor. In a single movement he brought his singlet, shirt and jumper over his head, their bodies and sleeves layered inside each other, just as he’d taken them off the night before. Then long johns, two pairs of socks, trousers, boots, jacket, gloves, scarf and cap. He kicked his pyjamas into the dusty gap betwee
n the washbasin and the toilet.

  He grabbed the milk bucket from behind the frayed square of old sheet tacked to the frame of the cupboard under the kitchen sink. He unbolted the front door and let it swing shut loudly. The apartment block’s corridors smelt of boiled cabbage, the most lingering of all the scents of other people’s lives that seeped from neighbouring flats. It competed with the acrid odour of unrefrigerated milk and kefir and sour cream, fish and sausage and old vegetables, sweet tobacco and damp clothes. Yet even when the cold froze away every last hint of those smells, the sour whiff of cabbage still hung in the passageway like a fog.

  He took the stairs two and three at a time. The building had an elevator – at least, it had an elevator shaft with doors on every floor and buttons beside them. But in all the years they’d lived there he’d never seen those doors open or heard the cables grind through their pulleys. Rumour had it that the builder’s four-year-old son had fallen from the top floor down the open shaft when the block was under construction. Leskov, the builder, was the Murphy’s immediate neighbour. His wife had left him after their son died and he’d lived there alone ever since. It was his place that stank the most.

  Alex heard his fellow milkmaids on the stairs below, but out in the courtyard it was just him, those others only the echoes of his own footsteps. Flurries of icy rain veiled the streetlights as he jogged down Gagarina Street towards Leninski Prospekt. He wasted no time once he reached the wide avenue, continuing towards the spot some quarter of a mile closer to the centre of town where the milk truck had stopped each morning the last eight days. He knew it would be there, a few near-frozen minutes into his future, even though he couldn’t see that far. He continued to jog, only slowing yards before the back of the queue, breathing heavily. He nodded to those in front, who’d swivelled their necks inside heavy overcoats and shawls to see who’d be fool enough to run down the darkened, icy street just to reach the back of the line more quickly. The half-smile from the old babushka directly in front wasn’t without comradeship, but Alex knew it had more to do with the satisfaction that with each addition to the line behind her, she was less near the back.