What the Light Reveals

by Mick McCoy

  Alex reached up and switched on the cabin light.

  ‘Actually, that’s a bad idea,’ Conrad said, shielding himself from the light.

  ‘No, I can drive.’

  ‘I shouldn’t have asked,’ he said, before coughing again into his handkerchief. The hospital outpatient clinic wouldn’t do any good – there’d be no specialists on duty so late at night. They should just go home. ‘Don’t worry about it.’

  They shouldn’t have been out there at all. He shouldn’t have dragged his boys to the awards function to do no more than satisfy his own pride, so they could see for themselves that there was value in their Moscow lives. His life, anyway. Thirteen years and he was still in need of reassurance from his family that he hadn’t ruined everything.

  ‘Dad, I can drive. Let me.’ He sounded confident.

  ‘Just a moment longer,’ Conrad said. ‘Give me a moment.’

  ‘I’m going to drive, Dad,’ Alex said again. ‘I’m going to drive.’

  ALEX

  The windscreen wipers did no more than smear drizzle across the glass with an insistent squawk. Alex opened his door, stepped out into the spitting rain, but then stooped through the doorframe into the cabin. He’d never seen his father cough up blood like that. He was half pissed from all the free vodka at the ceremony; fully pissed, probably. ‘Maybe we should go to the hospital.’

  Conrad shook his head.

  His father was hiding something. He couldn’t remember if he’d ever been worried about him before. The feeling of betrayal and isolation he’d been carrying around all day, since finding those birth certificates, was forgotten. He walked around the front of the car and opened the driver’s door.

  Conrad folded his handkerchief, shoved it into his trouser pocket and climbed out. He gave his son a hug. ‘Thank you,’ he said, tears still in his eyes and his breath foul with sickness.

  They were parked in a side street behind Borovitskaya station on the wrong side of the Moskva River, five miles from home. Alex imagined he could smell fallen rain on train tracks. What was it? Graphite? It smelled still, peaceful, like a storm’s aftermath.

  His father’s lungs eased and together they planned to take the quieter streets that flanked the main roads, all the way home. Alex adjusted the rear-view mirror, worked the column shift into first and pulled away from the kerb. Within fifty yards the rain began falling again and his father was coughing, neither letting up. Through it all Conrad conducted their passage along the dark streets with mime and gesture, slowly raising his hand when he wanted Alex to accelerate, flipping it over for gear changes, letting it hover for maintaining speed. For braking, he’d push down towards the floor. It was perfect. Alex wondered whether they should always communicate this way: no words and no eye contact, just hand signals and touch.

  They made their way towards home, first along Znamenka Street and across the river, then down a series of darkened laneways and side streets Alex hadn’t known existed. A mile from home the rain got heavier. Alex slowed, dropping down a gear and then another. The windscreen wipers were useless, spreading the rainwater across the glass like rubber spatulas smoothing icing on a cake. Conrad pointed to the kerb.

  ‘It’s okay, Dad, I’ll just take it easy.’

  Conrad shook his head. ‘Stop.’

  Alex pulled in and they sat with the engine spluttering. Rain drummed against the car’s roof, constant and thunderous. Peter was still asleep. Fifty yards down the road there was a light on the corner of Vavilova Street, their street. Alex smiled. ‘You can probably talk to me now, Dad – you haven’t coughed in a while.’

  Conrad breathed. ‘We understand each other better with hand signals.’ He leaned forward and peered through the windscreen at the black sky.

  ‘You want me to start again?’

  Conrad nodded.

  Alex shifted into gear and pulled away from the kerb. The Moskvich was doing about twenty as it nosed into the corner of Vavilova Street, storm water draining across a shallow trough and lifting each wheel just enough that traction was lost. The car began to aquaplane, Alex still pressing his foot to the accelerator pedal. The engine revved higher, howling as the wheels spun free, the Moskvich’s backend swinging out wildly. Headlights approached, their beams like flares in Alex’s eyes. Conrad shouted, rain thundered against the cabin roof and a car horn blared. For a long second the car glided across the wrong side of the road towards the opposite kerb, Alex yanking erratically at the steering wheel. They spun through 180 degrees before the passenger side slammed into a telegraph pole. All the car’s weight and speed and energy were reduced to dead stop in just twelve inches of crumpled steel as three bodies banged and lurched about in the cabin, before the back door sprung its latch and flicked wide open.

  Alex sat perfectly still, the engine stalled, his hands gripping tight on the wheel, his father beside him. They looked at each other. There was no blood. There seemed to be no blood. Conrad reached for Alex’s hands to loosen his grip on the wheel. Rain crashed down. The windscreen wipers flicked spastically. Alex peered out at the intersection the Moskvich had just skated through, back to where they’d come from. It seemed further away than it should have been. There were no other cars, no other people. What had happened to the approaching headlights? The screeching horn? He couldn’t make sense of it.

  He touched his chest, his legs, his face, his arm, his father’s hand as it gripped his.

  Outside, three cars were parked against the opposite kerb. Apartment blocks leaned in from both sides of the street. It was hard to see because of the dim streetlight and the rain, which whistled through the open rear door and blew across the empty back seat.

  ‘Peter!’ Conrad pulled himself around towards the back.

  ‘The door,’ Alex said, pointing at the night flooding in.

  Conrad put his shoulder to his own door to get out, but it was bent and jammed.

  Alex ran around the rear of the car and onto the footpath where Peter lay, not moving. He fell to his knees, pressed an ear to his brother’s mouth. He touched Peter’s face, running the tips of his fingers over his temple and along his upper lip where darkness hid warm traces of blood. He thought back to the punch he’d landed on his brother’s nose that morning, to calling him an arsehole, to trying to convince himself he didn’t blame him for being the natural son of Conrad and Ruby Murphy.

  Peter’s eyes opened. Unhurriedly, they scanned around as if he were in bed, lying quietly in a room he didn’t recognise. Alex bent over him, his face inches away, but Peter didn’t see him, his eyes searching.

  His lips moved.

  ‘What did you say?’ Alex looked back at the car. His father had scrambled over to the back seat. ‘Peter, what did you say?’ He knelt, his ear at Peter’s mouth. ‘Peter?’

  His brother’s eyes were wide open and the rain splashed into them.

  Alex rolled onto his back and slumped onto the footpath, next to Peter’s body. He kept his own eyes open, forced them to stay open, to watch those raindrops tumble all the way in. But he couldn’t do it. He blinked like a coward and squeezed his eyes shut. And with the wind loud in his head, he understood what Peter had said.

  Those words. Those last words. How they made him feel.

  * * *

  His father lifted Peter, holding him against his chest.

  Alex sat on the footpath, shivering, the cold enough to crack bones. ‘His eyes are getting wet,’ he said, watching his father tremble.

  ‘We were always lucky,’ Conrad said. ‘Until today, we were always lucky.’

  ‘Dad.’

  ‘He hears me,’ Conrad said. ‘I know it, I know he hears me.’ He hugged Peter’s body, rocking quietly as if to calm a baby.

  ‘Dad, what should we do?’

  Conrad eased Peter from his arms. ‘No one has come,’ he said. ‘Someone will come.’

  ‘Maybe we should bring him back to the car?’

  ‘Let’s wait here a while. Someone will come.’

  �
��Should we get Mum?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But later.’ He squeezed Alex’s shoulder.

  Lights came on in the foyer of the nearest block of flats. Or had they always been on? A man stood against the doorframe, hands in pockets, lethargic, like he’d just woken. He was unshaven, half a shirt collar poking from a pullover.

  ‘Prostite, tovarishch. Excuse me, comrade,’ Conrad said. ‘Could you please call for a doctor? Or an ambulance?’

  ‘Nyet, ni nada,’ the leaning man said. No, no need. ‘Politsiya.’

  Alex wondered whether the man realised the grey Moskvich was a government car. He was sure to have, and he couldn’t have missed his father’s foreign accent.

  ‘Did you see what happened?’ Conrad said.

  The man shook his head. ‘Politsiya,’ he repeated. ‘They will take care of it all, I’m sure,’ he added in clear English, before he pulled the door shut behind him.

  ‘Let’s wait in the car,’ Conrad said.

  ‘We can’t just leave Peter here.’

  Conrad squatted down, slid an arm underneath Alex’s shoulders and lifted him up. Just moments before, his lungs had seemed incapable of supplying enough air for his own body, but he picked Alex up off the footpath and, without wheeze or effort, walked him to the open driver’s door.

  ‘Get in and wriggle across,’ he said. ‘I can’t, I don’t fit.’

  Conrad climbed into the car after Alex and began rubbing at the steering wheel with his old handkerchief. Smearing it with muck.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  Conrad coughed, rested, then coughed again. He pulled his coat sleeve over the heel of his palm and rubbed at the steering wheel further. He sat for a few seconds once he’d finished, reached into his coat pocket to retrieve a small box, flipped up its lid and held it in his lap. Even in the dark Alex could see the heat flash across his face, his forehead furrow for a heartbeat, before he slapped the lid shut and threw the box onto the dashboard like an empty cigarette packet. He got out of the car and walked through the rain back to Peter’s body.

  Alex reached for the box. Inside was the Badge of Honour the government had given his father that night. Stupid, trivial little token. He left the box on the dashboard, lid open.

  Conrad was on his haunches beside Peter’s body, rain dripping from his coat, staring at his dead son, his flesh and blood son. He came back to the car, lowered himself in behind the steering wheel and stared at the award sitting in its open box.

  ‘I did this,’ he said. ‘I was driving, okay? You never sat in this seat.’

  ‘But Dad …’

  He held the overused handkerchief to his mouth. ‘No matter who asks,’ he said, squeezing the words out. ‘The police, your mother … no matter who.’

  Neither of them said anything more until the police arrived.

  RUBY

  ‘I’m not coming tomorrow night.’

  They were sitting up in bed, reading, the night before the awards ceremony and the 7 November parade. Conrad had an engineering journal open. He let it drop into his lap and took off his glasses.

  ‘The house committee meeting is on,’ she said. ‘I have to go.’

  He rubbed at the corners of his eyes. ‘Ruby, please,’ he said. ‘Skip the parade and come to the awards night.’

  The frail light from their bedside lamps gave his face a sepia veneer, a waxy sheen. Ruby wanted him to look at her, so he could see what was in her eyes.

  ‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘The meeting is a pathetic excuse.’ She waited but still he kept his eyes from her. ‘I won’t be coming because I refuse to celebrate our lives here. I won’t celebrate our imprisonment.’

  ‘Not this again.’

  ‘You’re our jailer.’

  Conrad coughed. ‘So there’ll be an empty seat tomorrow night?’

  ‘Is that all you’ve got to say?’

  ‘For now, yes.’

  She took his glasses from him. ‘I’m sorry, but that’s not enough. I just accused you of holding our family prisoner.’

  ‘Not for the first time.’ In Conrad’s smile Ruby saw his confidence that he’d be able to sidestep and deflect and defer any confrontation, just like he’d always done.

  ‘This is different.’

  He pointed at his throat. ‘I can’t talk now.’ He swallowed noisily.

  ‘I know about that, too. You don’t know I know, but I do.’ She threw back the sheets and climbed out of bed. ‘Tuberculosis,’ she said. ‘Do you think I believe that?’

  ‘This weekend, I promise,’ he said. ‘We’ll talk.’ He patted the bedcovers. ‘After the ceremony.’

  Ruby slid her feet back into bed and sat against the propped-up pillows. Conrad laced his fingers through Ruby’s and kissed each knuckle.

  ‘I’ve got to sleep,’ he said. ‘This weekend. We’ll find the time.’ He slid down, pulled the blankets under his chin and rolled away from her.

  Ruby didn’t move. She stared out past the foot of the bed. So there’ll be an empty seat. How could he do that? But he did. She let him.

  * * *

  House committee meetings were agonisingly boring. First, a comradely court was convened to resolve a dispute between a doctor from the third floor – Karl Wadek, of whom Ruby knew little – and her immediate neighbour, Mikhail Leskov, the foreman who’d overseen the building of the apartment block, who lived alone in the prime top-floor spot as part compensation for his labour. Dr Wadek’s complaint was about Leskov’s slapdash work practices, a problem shared by everyone in the block. A sloppy approach to the building’s construction had ensured ongoing demand for Leskov’s work from his neighbours. Window glass that didn’t fit, crooked doors with misaligned or absent latches, wall and floor tiles mismatched in colour and shape, laid in crooked lines, or just falling off. Ceiling plaster that dropped either suddenly in chunks or in persistent fine mists of powder, blown by winds that whistled through the wall cavities. Ruby’s apartment had suffered most of these failings over the years and yet their block and all the apartments in it were spacious beyond the imaginings of many others in Moscow. Still, no other builder or repairman would touch the place, so there wasn’t a single resident who hadn’t paid Leskov handsomely to not quite fix their heating, electrical faults, plumbing blockages and sundry other defects.

  The result – in Leskov’s favour – would’ve been different had anyone else raised the dispute. It didn’t matter that others shared Wadek’s view, or that he put it fairly and plainly; it was enough that his complaint confirmed their prejudice about doctors and their sense of entitlement. There was another engineer who lived in the building, a couple of factory managers, a Party official, along with ordinary workers. Had any of them brought the complaint it would have been dealt with. The Party official, of course, didn’t have to complain to get things done, nor did he have to come to house committee meetings. Nevertheless, Ruby was glad to have made the doctor’s acquaintance and she was the only one to support his claims.

  Next up was the greenery group, whose autumn grass sowing and birch-tree planting in the rear courtyard was two seasons too late, everything laid to waste by the approaching winter’s black ice. Why they’d bothered in the first place Ruby couldn’t guess. Then followed a parents’ school committee item, during which a neighbour declared that Ruby would logically make an excellent maths tutor because her husband was an engineer. When no one else volunteered, even though she was hopelessly under-skilled, she agreed to do it. Four further topics, four more resolutions, a little under two hours of practical communism, finishing right on 11 p.m.

  Dr Wadek had left the meeting straight after his claim was refused. Despite the lateness of the hour, Ruby decided to pay him a visit. For one thing, she wanted to talk to him about Conrad. She wanted a second opinion, one which she saw and heard herself. And she wanted that opinion before Conrad went into hospital for his new round of tests on Monday. She wanted Wadek to convince Conrad that she was right and he was better off out of this pl
ace. Better off in Australia.

  She hesitated outside his apartment and then rapped on the braced plywood door. She wiped her hands against her dress, waited, knocked again. She’d written a note but she decided against slipping it under the door. By the time she’d climbed back up to her floor, she’d convinced herself to call on him again over the weekend.

  Back at home she listened to the radio while finishing off a translation. Like many of her colleagues from the Moscow News she’d picked up a little extra translating work to supplement her regular wage, as well as the ghosting work with Novy Mir that Conrad didn’t approve of. Conrad couldn’t see that he’d become the kind of conventional-thinking functionary that, in Australia, he’d railed against. He couldn’t disentangle the practice of government from its ideals, whereas Ruby knew that any government, unchallenged, cared less for ideals than for power.

  On Friday nights Ruby liked to listen to the BBC, or Radio Liberty from Munich when it wasn’t jammed. She sat at the kitchen table with the radio on, labouring through a chapter of a stodgy, anti-reformist text called Moscow Woman that would earn her better money than anything else she was doing. She decided that no matter what Conrad said to her that weekend, no matter what apologies or excuses he made, she would respond by telling him that she’d take the boys and leave for Australia as soon as possible. Whether he chose to come with them or stay behind would be up to him.

  * * *

  It was past one when she woke, still sitting at the table. The awards ceremony was supposed to have finished at eleven. Conrad and the boys should’ve been home long ago. She lifted the corner of the blind. Constant, heavy rain.

  She wrapped herself in her heaviest coat and scarf and grabbed an umbrella. After first checking the rear car park, Ruby made her way out to the icy footpaths and along Vavilova Street, heading for Leninski Prospekt, where she walked alongside the eight lanes of sparse traffic, watching the headlights as they approached. Despite the rain, she smiled to herself imagining that behind one pair of those beams would come a toot-toot from her husband. Ruby stood in the rain, sodden and cold, the umbrella useless in the wind, and stared into the flashing dark for half an hour. The institute where the awards ceremony had been held would be closed, so there was no point thinking about how she might get there. The only thing to do was to go back to the flat and wait.