What the Light Reveals

by Mick McCoy

  AFTER

  CONRAD

  Conrad shared a room with three other men, all TB sufferers, their metal-framed beds lined up along one wall. A single wooden chair was the only seating to share amongst the four patients, if visitors came, and there were no curtains or screens for privacy.

  He’d regained consciousness soon after Ruby found him on the bathroom floor that morning. She’d called Valentin, who had come over immediately and driven him to the hospital, Ruby and Alex in the back seat. She’d left as soon as he was admitted.

  ‘He’s safe now,’ she’d said. ‘And I’m tired. I need to be alone.’ Despite that, she asked Valentin to drive her home and Alex to come with her.

  It was late afternoon before Alex and Valentin returned. Two small windows opposite the beds caught the last of the day’s cloudy light.

  ‘Gde Mama?’ Conrad said, without greeting them. ‘Where’s Mum?’ He spoke in Russian, not wanting to draw the attention of his fellow patients with a conversation in English.

  ‘Doma. Home,’ Alex said, following his father’s lead. ‘Ona skazala, chto ona slishkom ustala, chtoby priyti. She said she was too tired to come.’ His voice was flat. He seemed exhausted, physically and emotionally, for which Conrad accepted full responsibility. But not so exhausted he couldn’t come in to visit.

  ‘How do you feel?’ Valentin said. ‘There’s a golf ball growing out of your forehead and half your face is purple.’

  ‘I need to get out of here,’ Conrad said, his voice reedy-thin.

  ‘I have arranged a private room. They will move you tonight,’ Valentin said quietly.

  ‘Thank you, but that’s not what I mean.’

  ‘I know, but it is best.’ Valentin sat on the edge of Conrad’s bed, bending close. ‘I have spoken with the police and everything is arranged. And Peter’s body has been moved to Donskoy Cemetery.’

  Alex leaned against the far wall beside the window.

  Conrad looked past Valentin. ‘Alex, come and sit.’

  Valentin stood to make room but Alex didn’t move.

  ‘Alex,’ Valentin said.

  He nudged himself tiredly from the wall, shuffled to the bed and sat. He seemed detached, rather than angry or surly.

  ‘Do you need me to come home?’

  Alex didn’t hesitate. ‘No, Dad, you’re too sick.’ It was clear he meant it, but his voice faltered.

  ‘Conrad, you’re staying here,’ Valentin said.

  He knew he had to stay. The tests scheduled for Monday had already been done and the doctors were sure they’d confirm the emphysema.

  ‘Well, okay, but you should go home and rest,’ he said to Alex. ‘And ask your mother to come in and see me, please.’

  Alex didn’t answer so Conrad reached out for his hands and held them tight. ‘Go. But wait outside a moment while I speak with Valentin.’

  Valentin nodded at Alex.

  ‘Bye, Dad,’ he whispered, in English. He smiled weakly at Valentin and went outside.

  ‘My boy is lost,’ Conrad said. ‘I have cast him adrift.’

  ‘It is a hard time for him,’ Valentin said. ‘The police know he was the driver.’

  Conrad closed his eyes and was quiet. He opened them to the neighbouring bed, its occupant propped up on pillows, awake, staring directly ahead out the window at the cloudy sky. ‘Who else knows?’

  ‘No one. You and me only.’

  ‘Not Ruby?’

  ‘They say they haven’t told her.’

  ‘It should stay that way,’ Conrad said. Valentin didn’t reply, but it was obvious he was holding something back. ‘This is not the place for a discussion. Just take care of my boy and Ruby. And ask her to come.’

  Conrad was shifted to a private room later that evening, after which the nurses took to calling him President Murphy. It relieved him of the three-man tubercular chorus of disgusting hacking and gurgling, an insight into what Ruby and the boys had been tolerating, but it was solitary.

  Alex came in every day, Valentin most days. Expat friends and neighbours from their apartment block were in and out. Ruby must have told them. They were all so timidly polite because of his illness and Peter’s death. They worried about Ruby’s desperate sadness, which Conrad only knew about through their reports because he hadn’t seen her since being admitted.

  ‘Is Mum coming in?’ he asked Alex on the second day, a Sunday.

  ‘I don’t know. She spent the day in bed yesterday.’

  Conrad couldn’t remember her ever doing that. ‘She’ll come when she’s ready,’ he said. He didn’t want to deepen the guilt he saw in Alex, extend it from how he must feel over having killed his brother, to also feeling responsible for the chill between his parents. So they talked about Alex’s course, which was due to resume the next day, and his own tests results, which confirmed the emphysema.

  They hatched a plan to go to Odessa in the New Year to get away from the cold. It was idle chatter, though, because neither of them expected he’d be well enough to travel such a distance.

  Conrad didn’t ask the question over the next few days, but on Wednesday he said, ‘Can you ask Mum to come, please?’

  Alex was reluctant. ‘I won’t see her until tonight. And she doesn’t talk to me, anyway.’

  ‘Not at all?’

  ‘The bare minimum.’

  ‘Is she okay, though?’

  ‘I don’t know. She hasn’t gone back to work, I don’t think.’

  ‘Has she asked about the accident?’

  He shook his head. ‘But I think she knows.’

  ‘About you driving? Why do you say that?’

  He shrugged, his shoulders heavy. ‘It’s just a feeling.’

  ‘The police didn’t tell her,’ Conrad said.

  ‘It was wrong, though, not to tell her.’

  ‘No, no,’ Conrad said. ‘What I did was wrong. Getting drunk. Asking you to drive.’

  Alex shouldered his bag. He’d only been there five minutes but already he was leaving. ‘I’ll ask her again,’ he said. ‘To come in and see you.’

  When she arrived the next morning, five days after he'd been admitted, she gave him the briefest peck on his forehead and sat on the side of his bed, her attention anywhere in the room but on him.

  The off-white painted walls were completely bare, interrupted only by a smudged rainbow around the head of his bed, stained a dirty yellow by frail hands and chipped by pushed bed frames. He was reminded of a scene from a movie, or perhaps it was a book he’d read, where a man and his wife sat either side of a table in a prison visiting room. A single sign, the only thing on the wall, read VISITORS ARE ALLOWED ONE KISS. He remembered her comment as they’d sat in bed the night before the parade and the awards ceremony and the accident about him being her jailer. The whole family’s jailer. He remembered how overdramatic he’d thought she was being. That was less than a week ago.

  Ruby still wore her coat. She stared out the open door, as if she wanted to dash from the room. He watched her shoulders sink before she took his hand. Everyone, it seemed, wanted to hold his hand since he’d been in hospital. He didn’t like it.

  ‘We had Peter’s funeral yesterday,’ she said. ‘He was cremated.’

  Of course Peter had to be cremated. Of course he couldn’t go. ‘Did you tell Alex not to tell me?’ he said. ‘Did he go?’

  She let go of his hand. ‘Why wouldn’t he go?’ She had such an expressive face. Unlike him, she couldn’t hide how bitter and irritable she was. She probably didn’t want to.

  ‘No reason.’ He tried to smile. ‘Where was the service?’

  ‘Donskoy Chapel, down the road from home. There’s a crematorium there.’ She stood and took off her coat. It looked like she’d recently had her hair done at a hairdresser, although he couldn’t remember when she’d last done that. ‘Fifteen minutes, it lasted. Alex and Valentin and I were the only people there, other than the priest, who knew nothing about Peter.’

  ‘I’m sorry I wasn’t there.�
��

  ‘Not as sorry as I am that it happened.’ Her face was stony, the effort to keep it that way enough to reduce her to silence.

  Conrad tried to think of something to say that wouldn’t cause her to erupt.

  ‘Valentin wanted him buried,’ she eventually said, with a sad smile. ‘We had a fight. “Respect demands a proper burial,” he said.’ She put on his deep voice. ‘“I’ll sell the car for scrap and pay for the headstone and casket.” I explained to him it wasn’t about the money. And I wouldn’t take a rouble that was in any way related to that damned car, I said. We argued about the stupid car, we argued about stupid Russian traditions and vanities. “If you don’t help me I’ll go ahead and arrange it myself,” I said. That’s when he changed his mind.’

  ‘I wish I’d been there,’ Conrad said. ‘I wish I could’ve helped you.’

  Ruby walked to the window. ‘I couldn’t come in here until the funeral was over. I couldn’t see you while his body was lying in a cold room.’

  Conrad sat in his bed, propped up on pillows, studying the veins in the backs of his hands.

  ‘Apparently no cremation happens in this Godless place without a priest to conduct the service,’ she said, still with her back to him. ‘Did you know that?’

  ‘No,’ Conrad said. ‘But come and sit down.’ In the hallway outside his door, a porter pushed a patient in a wheelchair, its rubber tyres screeching. ‘Please, Rube.’ Even then, standing in the thin light of a winter’s day, she was beautiful. In his eyes she’d always been beautiful.

  ‘Could you bring me a photograph?’ he said. ‘It’s so cold in here. A shot of all of us.’

  ‘A happy snap,’ she said, no smile. No warmth in her eyes.

  ‘Yes, please.’

  She waited a long time before she replied. ‘All right. A happy snap.’

  ALEX

  She boarded the 119 bus at his stop on Leninski Prospekt, carrying a string bag in each hand, full of groceries and small brown-paper packages, cheese and sausage most probably. She wasn’t dressed like a local and she didn’t look like one.

  The bus was crowded, more so than usual. One gruff old bastard thought it was a good idea to travel with his dog, a huge Saint Bernard with wet muddy paws. The dog was as placid as its owner was bad-tempered, but the saliva that gathered in its drooping cheeks smeared Alex’s coat as the bus lurched away from the stop. Boris was what the grumpy bastard called the Saint Bernard. Alex decided not to complain about the slobber.

  The trip to the university campus was short, only five kopeks, but it was so cold you’d be crazy to walk. The crowded aisle meant the girl with the string bags couldn’t push her way to the cashbox so, as was the custom, she gave her money to the next person along and said, ‘Pozhaluysta, peredayte eto naryadu. Dva kopeyek. Please, pass this along. Five kopeks.’ She had an English accent.

  ‘Dvadtsat’ kopeyek! Twenty kopeks!’ Boris’s grumpy owner snatched the coin from her and held it high for all to see. ‘For a five-kopek ticket! The foreign bitch is too good for a five. She expects us all to do her money-changing for her!’

  Alex reached up and grabbed the money. ‘Pozhaluysta, please,’ he said. He pressed through the crowd towards the cash box, muttering ‘izvinite, izvinite, excuse me, excuse me.’ The normal practice of passing along the fare wasn’t always smooth. There could be arguments, you didn’t always get your change or your ticket, though mostly you did. So Alex, breaking from protocol and muttering his apologies in his own foreign accent, only prompted further swearing. ‘Slovoch! Bastard!’ He pressed on, secured her ticket and his, plus her change, and then endured a repeat of the barrage as he made his way back. He reached Boris and stretched across the dog’s back to hand over her ticket and the change, only a moment before his stop.

  The English girl squeezed his hand. ‘Bol’shoye spasibo,’ she said. ‘Thank you so much.’

  ‘Sukin syn!’ Boris’s owner said. ‘Son of a bitch!’

  Alex smiled as she stepped aside for him to pass on his way to the door, but then followed him off the bus.

  ‘Oh,’ he said, but could think of nothing further. He moved his bag, only lightly packed, from one shoulder to the other.

  ‘I can’t thank you enough,’ she said, her string bags twirling around her fingers.

  Her bright red coat was way too flimsy for the Moscow winter, and lacked the typical broad fur collar to fold up against the wind, essential when the temperature dipped below zero. Local coats were coarse woollen things, in one shade of drab or another: olive, tan, dirt, the same colour as the buildings. The thin scarf at her neck was no substitute for the shawls that local women wore. And her hat, although fur, had no flaps to cover her ears. But she did look beautiful in it all.

  A fringe of black hair spilt from under her hat and across her eyebrows, sheltering deep brown eyes. She smiled. On the side of her nose was a mole, small and dark.

  Alex had not yet found his voice.

  ‘I’m Sinead,’ she said. ‘Can we walk? Which way are you going?’

  After he introduced himself, they established they were both on their way to MSU. She agreed to let Alex carry one of her two grocery bags back to the campus dormitory, where she had a room.

  ‘Have you been here long?’ Alex asked as they crossed Mokhovaya Street.

  ‘Is it that obvious?’

  ‘The coat.’

  She smiled that smile again, one corner of her mouth lifted, like she was laughing with him. ‘The guy with the dog on the bus figured it out too. He groped me,’ she said. ‘I’ve been here seven weeks today and that was my third groping.’

  Alex stopped. ‘Really?’

  They were outside the campus dormitory which was in the main MSU building. Built to Stalin’s visions of grandeur with a central tower over twenty stories high and shaped like an oversized wedding cake, it dwarfed everything else around.

  ‘Will you come inside?’

  Inside the foyer? Her dorm room? There’d be security, he’d need ID and a pass he didn’t have. He pushed open the door for her and they stepped inside. At a desk sat an old crone who checked everyone’s credentials. She eyed him suspiciously.

  Sinead rubbed her hands together vigorously. ‘And you?’ she asked. ‘How long have you been here? I’d have picked you for a local.’

  Alex sighed. ‘Thirteen years, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Oh, my,’ she said. ‘That’s … incredible. Why? How?’

  He pictured himself and Sinead together, alone in her room, if he could get past the old woman. ‘I’d love to tell you about it,’ he said, ‘but I’ve got to go to class.’ He had no class, but as much as he wanted to stay with her, he wanted to step away. Step away and come back. ‘You got on near Leninski Prospekt, right? Do you know the Crystal cafe?’

  ‘There’s a cafe there?’

  ‘I could show it to you.’

  She tilted her lips into that smile again. ‘I’d like that.’

  ‘What time do you finish?’

  ‘Four o’clock.’

  ‘I’ll see you right after four, then,’ Alex said. He checked his collar before heading back out into the weather. ‘Here?’

  ‘Here’s good,’ she said, touching his sleeve.

  RUBY

  ‘I hear Peter in the flat,’ Ruby said.

  Alex was at the kitchen table. He’d just removed film from his camera and wore the faraway expression that had settled on his face since his brother died and his father went to hospital. He was rarely at home, spending hours each day taking photographs – veterans or drunks or madmen, or all of those things in one – who lived on the streets or in part-finished apartment blocks. At least that’s what he said he was doing.

  And when he was home, the flat was awkwardly, painfully quiet with only the two of them in it. He made sure he was distracted by something. He didn’t talk or listen to Ruby. He didn’t want to be around her.

  ‘What did you say?’ he asked.

  She was certain he’d heard.
She was at the stove, three yards from him. ‘I hear Peter in the flat,’ she repeated. What she said would get under his skin, which was the point. She needed to draw him out of himself so they could talk, but all he did was wind in a new roll of film. ‘Can you put that stuff away and set the table?’

  He sat back. ‘What do you mean, you hear Peter?’

  ‘Just then,’ she said. ‘Just a minute ago, it was as if he was here.’

  Alex capped a film canister, walked into the kitchen and pulled two bowls from the drawer, placing them next to the stove.

  ‘It’s like it’s the morning of the accident,’ she said. He hovered at her shoulder, too close. ‘Your father has gone to work, you’re out getting the milk, and it’s just me and Peter at home, instead of me and you.’

  Alex collected two spoons and the sugar bowl and carried them to the table. She relaxed a little.

  ‘I can hear his bed creak,’ she said, ‘hear him walk across the living room floor, his feet in thick socks padding lightly to the bathroom.’ She shared out the porridge. ‘I can hear him sitting where you are, trying to read Uncle Vanya.’ She carried the bowls to the table, taking the chair next to Alex. He kept his back to her, staring at his bedroom door. ‘But it’s not that morning, before everything happened,’ she said. ‘It’s today. And it’s not Peter, it’s you.’

  ‘What’s your point, Mum?’

  ‘You could be him,’ she said, pausing to watch him for a moment, about to add, You’re my son, just like him.

  ‘I’m not him, though, am I?’ he said.

  With sudden awful clarity she realised how those words must have sounded to him. ‘That’s not what I meant.’ She gripped his hand, wondering how she could have got it so wrong.

  He pulled away from her. ‘You want to talk about the accident. Or Peter, so go ahead,’ he said. ‘I don’t know why you haven’t already.’ There was such darkness in his eyes she wondered if he might hit her.

  ‘Every day we talk about Peter.’ Her spoon trembled in her hand as she began to eat, the food dry and clumpy in her mouth.